This Old House: Borrowing a Cup of Fire
I’ve actually spent most of my life trying to build a home, before I even knew why. I just didn’t realize that’s what I was doing.
For years, I thought I was collecting people.
Communities.
Careers.
Ideas.
Relationships.
And looking back, I wasn’t collecting any of those things. I was searching for somewhere to belong. For a long time, I assumed belonging was something you stumbled into.
Or more accurately…
Something we built out of the materials available to us.
The right workplace.
The right group of friends.
The right city.
The right relationship.
Eventually one of those combinations would feel like home. Of course, there was a different pattern hiding underneath all of that. I no longer think we choose our favourite stories, the choose us. They mirror our hopes and our realities. Sometimes the reveal something to us too.
A social life.
Or even an identity.
I was trying to build somewhere my nervous system could finally exhale.
For years, I thought I simply liked certain movies because of proximity. Looking at two of my favourite movies of all time, its easy to say I was the right age.
Ghostbusters was in the theaters the summer before I was born, and it was released on VHS in the fall of 1986 and The Real Ghosbusters cartoon came out the following year 1987. It became the wallpaper of my childhood.
The Fast and the Furious arrived in theatres the summer of 2001, a high octane riff on Point Break (which I maintain is a lie). The summer I had finished grade 10. My friend Nick and I actually wanted to sneak in to see American Pie 2, got caught us in a lie, panicked, and ended up in the correct theatre.
Now I’m not so sure.
Because looking back, I don’t think I was collecting entertainment because of proximity. I was searching for somewhere to belong. For pieces I couldn’t explain yet.
The Characters We Borrow
I’ve started wondering whether our favorite stories function less like windows… and more like mirrors. Just not literal mirrors that show us who we are today.
Why does one person obsess over The Lord of the Rings while another can’t stop thinking about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?
We usually assume our favourites say something about our taste. I think they often say something about our needs.
It’s because adults never really stop borrowing. We simply become more sophisticated about it. We borrow clothing. Before we know how to build our own homes, we borrow blueprints.
Children pretend to be Batman. Adults rarely wear capes. We borrow quieter things.
Ways of speaking.
Ways of leading.
Ways of loving.
Entire philosophies. We try them on… Hoping something finally feels like home.
For a long time I assumed “home” was something I would eventually find.
The right workplace.
The right friend group.
The right relationship.
The right city.
Every new chapter felt like maybe this was it. Permission to stop searching.
That’s the thing about borrowed blueprints.
They can help us imagine a home.
But they can’t build one for us.
We continusouly try to solve a question we haven’t finished asking ourselves with borrowed resources.
Thats new. Thats the mistake of forgetting to build.
Identity Crisis
Art gives us permission to rehearse identities before we’re brave enough to live them.
Looking back, I can trace my life through campfires.
High school.
Art school.
The Brick.
Driving Force.
First Canadian.
Board game nights.
Therapy.
Every one of them gave me something. Every one of them changed me.
Where can I finally put the fire down?
Every one of them eventually asked me a difficult question. Are you still becoming here?
I’ll Tell You A Story.
One night in my early twenties my highschool friend group were all playing Kings Cup at my parents’ house.
By then we’d been friends for years.
Long enough that everyone had settled into their roles.
Dustin was the centre of gravity. He drove everywhere and always vocalized the plans.
Ashley balanced him and was the second voice.
The rest of us orbited somewhere around that.
At one point during the game, he looked at me after picking Truth and asked,
“Why don’t you treat me like a best friend?”
It was supposed to be a drinking game question.
Instead… something broke open. I remember unloading years of things I’d never actually said out loud.
How everything always seemed to revolve around him.
How we always played what he wanted.
How I was the one dressing up as the school mascot because nobody else wanted to commit to the joke.
How I kept helping him and Ashley patch things back together whenever they fought.
How I’d spent years trying to keep this little world alive.
And then I said something that surprised even me.
I reminded him that this whole friend group only existed because I’d given him a second chance years earlier. At a campfire in my parents backyard.
Breaking a Leg.
Earlier that same summer, I literally broke my leg.
Not doing anything responsible.
Not doing anything practical.
I was chasing someone.
Because I was finally becoming someone willing to take risks.
I’d started building a different life. Art school had quietly changed me. I wasn’t spending every weekend with my high school friends anymore.
I was organizing games of Manhunt around downtown Edmonton. Hide-and-go-seek for twenty-somethings, as we called it.
I was making friends who talked about paintings instead of math homework. Staying up until two in the morning arguing about films, music and philosophy around campfires.
I’d also met someone who made me nervous in the best way. So when she chased someone down an alley during a game happening during Taste of Edmonton…
I jumped at a chance to look cool.
I landed badly.
And snapped my tibia.
It sounds ridiculous now.
And looking back… that wasn’t the worst part of the story. The important part came afterward. I immediately couldn’t walk.
I needed help.
Getting me back to the car meant walking down three flights of stairs from the street to the Churchill library parkade. My brother and sister insisted Dustin come get us. He didn’t really want to. On the drive home he wanted to stop for slurpees. And I remember sitting there thinking…
Something feels different now.
For years I told that story as though it was about Dustin and my friendship fallout.
About the slurpees.
About not helping.
About the one-sidedness of the group.
It wasn’t.
I had spent years trying to build and keep our shared world together. Meanwhile… my own world had quietly grown beyond it.
I had already started building another life. Art school had changed the questions that mattered to me. I wasn’t spending every weekend with the same people anymore.
I was organizing games downtown.
Meeting artists.
Falling in love with different ideas.
Refining myself.
My body broke in one evening on a risk. But that friendship had quietly fractured months earlier.
That realization hurt far more than the broken leg. I was searching for somewhere my fire could finally live.
And that game of King’s Cup was a catalyst.
The Green Flame
Maybe that’s why certain stories refuse to leave us.
I’ve realized I rarely leave the moment something becomes difficult. My instinct is almost always to rebuild or renovate.
Improve the process.
Repair the relationship.
Design a better system.
Translate until we’re finally speaking the same language.
Sometimes that’s one of my greatest strengths.
Sometimes that’s how I mistake endurance for belonging.
Sometimes its how I convince myself that if I renovate one more room… this old house will finally feel like home.
Eventually I realized the harder question wasn’t:
“Can I fix this?”It was:
“Is this still home?”
These stories are pointing toward something underneath all the roles we’ve accumulated.
A quieter self.
A truer self.
The part that keeps whispering…“This matters.”
Even when we can’t explain why.
I’ve started calling that part… The green flame. Not because it’s dramatic. Although I do enjoy theatricality, under the right tense. It’s because every person seems to carry some internal hearth. And its became part of the language of my own art.
Something worth protecting. Worth returning to.
An identity that survives disappointment.
Expectation.
Performance.
Adaptation.
The fire that remains after everything unnecessary burns away.
In other words, I CAN go camping. I absolutely should. We grow when we leave our comfort zones.
But I CANNOT abandon my home fire. My hearth stone.
For me, tending that hearth has meant:
Making art again.
Writing every week.
Therapy.
Meditation.
Exercise.
Honest conversations.
Learning to become less.
None of these things solved my life on their own. There was no silver bullet. Collectively, they remind me where home is. Thats the difference.
I still leave.
I still explore.
I still borrow cups of fire from other people.
But now, I always know where I am carrying them back to.
Building a hearth that still feels like mine, whether anyone joins me around the fire or not.
theories Summarized
The older I get…
The less interested I become in asking whether a piece of art is good.
I’m becoming much more interested in a different question.
What part of me recognized itself inside this?
Maybe that’s what our favourite stories have been doing all along.
Not entertaining us.
Introducing us.
I’m going to be super real right now. I don’t think writing these essays has simply helped me organize my thoughts.
I think they’ve helped me build a home. Every story I’ve written over the past four months has been another stone. Another beam. Another window.
Another place where I can recognize myself when I inevitably get lost again.
The drawings have done the same thing.
Every skeleton.
Every ghost.
Every little green flame.
Every abandoned train station.
They aren’t just symbols anymore. They’re landmarks.
Proof that I’ve been here before. Proof that I know the way back.
Healing hasn’t looked like finally finding the perfect campfire. It’s becoming the version of me who can build one.
Someone who can leave.
Someone who can explore.
Someone who can borrow a cup of fire from another person’s hearth…
And still know exactly where he’s carrying it back to. Maybe that’s what home has always been. The place I can keep returning to… after the campfire gets cold.
