The Jumpsuit Monologues: What the Phoenix Wears Between the Burnings

Step right up, step right up, don't you blink or you'll miss the show, a bird that dies right here tonight and you'll watch her do it slow, no net beneath her, no trick of the light, no mirror and no wire, just feathers going gold at the tips and a whole life catching fire!

Step into the jumpsuit, darling, zip it up past your chin, this one's stitched from every ending you have ever climbed back in, you won't believe the color when the whole thing starts to burn, stick around, stick around, folks, and watch how fast a bird can learn

that dying, for this one, isn't the end of the ride, it's just the part of the show where she has to go inside the fire she's been carrying since before this tent was built, and if you're waiting for a net, friend, I'll tell you now, there's no net, no quilt, nothing soft below her, nothing but the ash she's known before, step right up and watch her walk in through her own front door.

Down through gold and down through ember, down where every feather goes, sinks the bird who knew this coming, sinks the way the sunset knows it must give the sky to darkness, give the branch back to the bare, and I have burned this way a thousand thousand times, and still, and still, I am not spared

the exact and total ache of it, no, I will not call it that, I will call it what it is instead, a weight, a stone, a coal gone flat against the roof of every throat I have ever worn to sing, I will call it the oldest debt a burning thing can bring.

Hear the feathers curling backward into smoke that has no shape, hear the marrow going liquid, hear the bone begin to drape itself in soft collapse, the way a curtain drops before a scene, and know that I have watched this exact undoing, coal by coal, obscene

and beautiful at once, so many endings that I lost the count somewhere around the hundredth, and I do not know what it will amount to, this time, this fire, whether the ash will hold my shape at all or simply scatter, indifferent, the way old ash will always fall

through fingers that were never truly fingers, only heat remembering the outline of a hand, a wing, a bird, a beat of something that had once, a long time back, called itself alive, and I go under now, I go under, and I do not know if I'll arrive

anywhere at all this time, and that, more than the burning, that not knowing, is the only wound in me still fully yearning to be closed, to be done, to be, for once, entirely through, and yet the fire does not ask me. It never once asks me. It only knew

that I would come back down to it, the way water finds its level, the way a debt returns to collect itself, patient as any devil, and I go down now, gold to red to black, and I do not sing, there is no song left in a throat becoming only ring of heat around an absence, and if you are listening for grace you will not find it here, only the exact and total erasing of a face

that will, against all sense, against all reasonable belief, be built again from nothing, out of ash, out of grief, and I do not know, going under, going down, going dark, whether that rebuilding is a mercy or a mark

burned into whatever I am that will not let me simply end, that insists, every time, on making me begin again, and I go under now. I go under. I am gone. I am gone. I am gone. I am gone.

And yet.

Nay, hold. What is a death but darkness asking leave to speak before the light resumes its rightful throne upon the day? I will not grant it more than that. I will not call this end a period set down upon the sentence of my life, but rather the small silence that a singer takes before the final verse, no less a part of the song for being still.

I have gone under a thousand times and a thousand times I have refused to let the going be the whole of what I am. Hear this: the fire does not raise me. I raise myself through the fire, as a king does not wait for the crown to be handed down but reaches, in the last dark hour before the dawn, and takes it, for that is what it means to wear a throne and not merely borrow one.

Let the ash think itself an ending if it must. Ash has never once been asked to remember what it carries. I remember. Every burning that has come before this one lives folded in whatever I will be an hour from now, not as scar, not as chain, but as the accumulated weight of proof, proof that the going under has never yet been final, proof that I have met the dark this many times and every time walked back out the only door that fire ever really offers.

I do not rise because the fire is kind. I rise because rising is the one word I have never once forgotten how to speak, in any tongue, in any shape, in any color this given collapse decides to leave behind for me to wear.

Let the flame have the body. It was only ever borrowed. Give me instead the small and stubborn thing beneath it that has never, not in all these endings, agreed to stay ended.

I am not reborn by chance.

I am reborn because I have never once, going under, stopped insisting on the word that follows darkness in every language that has ever bothered inventing one.

Again.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you look at that, would you look at what just walked back out of her own fire, feathers gold, still a little bit scorched, still smelling faintly of smoke and stubbornness, still here, still whole enough to bow, and I want you to remember, when you leave this tent tonight, exactly how

she did not do this because the flame was gentle, she did not do this because the ash was kind to her, she did this the same way she's always done, because some things don't get to choose whether they burn, but they get to choose, every time, whether they climb back out singing or go quiet, and darling, that's the whole rhyme,

that's the whole show, that's the whole reason you paid your admission at the door, not to watch a bird die pretty, but to watch her, one more time, want more.

Step out of the jumpsuit now. Let it hang there, still warm, by the door. It'll be ready when you need it. It always has been. It always is. It's yours.

She has done this before. She will do it again. The fire has never once asked permission and neither, in the end, has she. Step right up. Step out. Step in again tomorrow. That is the whole trick. There was never any other one.