Two Fires, One Road

I finished writing the previous chapter.

I wrote about a bank president
who could no longer find his way out of hope.

I wrote about the ninety-three-year-old man—

Eighty thousand dollars.
The entirety of his life savings.

After losing it,
he never found his way back.

I also wrote about another victim who said:

“If someone gave me another five hundred thousand dollars,
I would still put it in.”

Because I kept believing—

one more step,
and I could get back the money I had already lost.

---

After I finished writing,

I sat at my desk
for a very long time without moving.

Because suddenly, I asked myself:

Why do these stories
hurt me so deeply?

Not only because pig-butchering scams are cruel.
Not only because the victims were innocent.

But because—

I recognized that state of mind.

That feeling of:

“One more step,
and everything will come back.”

---

I did not see it only in the scam.

I had seen it once before—

in a fire.

The fire in Dallas.
The motel fire.
The fire that had already begun burning
before the telephone rang in the middle of the night.

---

After that fire,

it took me many years
to slowly understand something:

Fire is never only fire.

It can burn down a building.
But it can also burn away
a person’s judgment.

And the most frightening thing
is not the fire outside.

It is the fire inside—

the one that still refuses to go out.

---

You may ask me:

Why return now to write about the fire?

I am not going back
to retell a disaster.

I am trying to show you this:

The same trap,
the same hope,
the same sentence—

“One more step.”

It appeared twice in my life.

The first time was Dallas.
The second time was the pig-butchering scam.

The first time,
it took me years to walk out of it.

The second time,
I recognized the road.

And perhaps because of that,
I did not remain trapped there forever.

---

And between those two events,
there was another experience.

The Colorado River.
A rubber raft.
And a Navajo man named David.

Many years earlier,

his feet had literally been nailed to the ground.
He was forced to remain standing for days.

That was not a metaphor.

And somehow,
he survived.

---

Many years later,

in the violent rapids of an overturned raft
on the Colorado River,

it was David
who pulled me back to the surface
when I had almost lost all strength.

---

Only much later did I begin to understand:

What he brought back
was not only my body.

He taught me, for the first time,

that even after a person has become trapped,

they can still be brought back.

---

So now,

come back with me.

Not back into pain.

But back to the place
where the fire first began.

Come and see:

how a woman
lost everything in a fire—

and how afterward,
little by little,

she called her spirit
back to herself.

---

And after all this understanding,

I slowly came to realize something else:

There are still things
that cannot be fully explained by structure alone.

Some things are fire.
Some things are forgiveness.

And some things
are simply a voice—

that keeps you alive
before you fully understand why.

---

Perhaps,

that is why—

I am still here.