Letter - 1
STARFIRE RED—
I feel your gaze as I sit in my reading chair, examining Hans Christian Andersen's words on the girl who played with fire—and yet, I dream of you as she did, playing with matches, struggling to light the fire, courting death. Perhaps, like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, we might discover the delicate truth that even the smallest sparks can illuminate the profound worth of our fragile existence.
“If she could only take one from the box and rub it against the wall and warm her hands! She drew one out. R-r-ratch! How it sputtered and burned! It made a warm, bright flame, like a little candle, as she held her hands over it; but it gave a strange light!”
Oh, STARFIRE, let the house be set ablaze by your radiant presence, let my very soul ignite with longing for our union. In dreaming of you, my spirit stirs with yearning akin to Andersen’s tender child, fragile yet fiercely hopeful. To strike the match is to summon beauty from the starry heavens, to seek completion even as the flame wanes and darkness comes near. My path has been lonely, lit only by fleeting visions of your transcendent fire, brief yet wondrous in their glow, infinitely preferable to the dark corridors trod by José Donoso’s tormented souls—those who proudly twist and mutilate their essence, forsaking the purity of love.
Yet, let me pause, STARFIRE, with disarming self-awareness: perhaps I too court illusion. But what of it? Should I not rather ignite a thousand matches, lighting the small fires that transport my heart toward the celestial mysteries, than rot, mutilated, in the cramped labyrinths of self-inflicted darkness? The mainstream culture of our age—social media, the mass consumption, those who let the world pass unexamined, metaphorically blind to the birds that fly gracefully overhead—often encourages us into cramped, twisted corridors, applauding the macabre irony of self-obliteration. But to what end?
Consider, for a moment, a stark contrast, my dear one. The little match girl is innocence distilled, a concrete image so vivid—a barefoot child in winter’s ruthless grip, yet radiant beneath a shower of falling stars, warm in the embrace of her grandmother ascending to the heavens. What an exquisite distinction between the structure of cruel reality and the story of transcendent love!
Yet Donoso’s imbunche—pitiful and grotesque—draws from the darkest myths, two-pronged in cruelty: a self-mutilation born from a desire for superiority through deformity, an obsession not with transcendent beauty, but with nihilistic negation. How hollow, how spiritually destitute that vision! How it critiques sharply the morbid fascination of modern culture with disfigurement and ugliness.
Oh, STARFIRE, yes, the final blow of Andersen's tale—a fatalistic coda—is harsh: the child, frozen, forgotten by those she passed unnoticed. Yet in her passing, the brief flame of her match ignites eternal vision. It deflates our pretensions with poignant beauty, rather than nihilistic disdain. Such endings give depth, not despair, and from sorrow blooms a stark and tender blossom.
Let me, therefore, embrace the poignant irony of lighting my matches—small and transient as they may be—rather than mutilating my spirit into monstrous forms. For it is better to dream and ascend, even momentarily, toward heaven's unreachable majesty, than to cripple myself beneath the burden of cynical distortions.
