I feel so old.

Like, really old. But not old like I’m in my 80s or something. I do not feel tired to my bones. I do not feel old in the sense that time has passed me by—just the opposite, time has been such a gift to me. I feel old because I feel like I’ve seen everything before, it all feels familiar & unoriginal. Utter shock is not something I experience often, little surprises me, my gut reaction is usually the right one. But I couldn’t always see things this way.

When I was 22, I met a classmate who was deeply interested in Numerology, the divine nature of numbers as they relate to the mortal plane. I was fascinated by her, she was a type of worldly curious character I had not yet encountered in my life. She seemed at least tickled by me. Over drinks in an opulent hotel lobby, she read my chart. The numbers 8 & 9, the highest in Numerology, cropped up often, and as she explained it to me it felt as if I was just only in this moment waking up from an awfully long dream.

“This is your last life cycle,” she stated factually, her knowing eyes staring down mine.

“9, you are old! You have lived many lives before.”

I laughed, & gulped the last of my gin & tonic, squeezing the lime between my teeth to see if it was still sour. Up until this point, I generally understood life as a one-&-done type of thing. I accepted that. This is my one shot, I must make something of it. I was already dreamy & driven. But this realization, this shift in understanding that perhaps mine was incorrect, jarred me.

Perhaps we do live many lives over millennia. The conscience leaving the mortal plane & churning in some infinite stew of other souls melding together until they are pulled back to another body to try another round. Until finally we’ve exhausted it—or completed it?—and it releases to, well, who knows where.

“Great, that’s cool,” I tried to soothe myself as I ordered my next drink, “I’m still done at the end of this one.” I had never seriously considered the notion of past lives, that it was more than just my paltry 20-something years behind me.

I stared up at the centuries-old, vaulted stone ceilings above me. Crystal chandeliers dangled down & chittered faintly under the drone of the lounge patrons. Light bounced from each individual piece and refracted back down to us below where it danced on our iced glasses and interpolated around silver candlesticks projecting dainty flames.

“How many lives contributed to this moment?” I wondered to myself.

I gazed around me, to the people by me. In this moment I was completely engulfed by the intrinsic beauty of life. I thought of the stone masons, trained over a lifetime, who built this hotel before my nation was even incorporated. Centuries of passersby have sat at these tables, shared jokes & secrets, how many people before me have had a revelation over a gin & tonic in this very spot? The table of classmates I had only just met, the lives they lived leaking into mine & vice versa. The people who raised them, who taught them the brilliant knowledge they hold inside them and have extrapolated to create their own. The cars that brought us here, the engineers that designed them, the philosophers who studied to make the invention of the sciences possible in the first place. The seam of the coat draped over my shoulders so perfectly sewn by the hands of some stranger I will never know, but whose effort has kept me warm for several winters. My grandmother who survived internment camps and fled across the ocean for a second chance at life. My grandfather who, as a boy, used to wake up in Boston winters to dead mice, desperate for warmth, underneath him. My next gin & tonic hit the bartop beside me with a resonant thud, heavy glass meeting the solid oak.

I finally realized that I have never been alone, and I never will be.

Everything I want, everything I dream of will not be completed in a vacuum—even if that’s what I tell myself, even if I had never come to realize what I did in this moment. I am held up by innumerable minds, bodies, and souls that have come before me, that are all around me. That have worked, and played, and laughed, and loved, and dug, and scraped, and prayed, and begged for life.

It’s purely miraculous any of us are right here. How could I ever take anything for granted?

And so this is my pursuit. To peel back the fog of reality, the isolation so many of us feel in this cold, robotic world we live in. Only to show you all that this life is so gorgeous. That the dreams we have are possible, that the kindness we seek is out there. Our lives are determined by so many things outside of our control. but these things are not chains, they are not boulders weighing us down. They are a set of tools & materials with no handbook. It is our destiny, maybe even our responsibility, to pick these things up and craft whatever we can.

Scream in the face of your fears, your doubts. Tear down any wall that holds you in. Blow the windows out of that shit and bust the door into splinters. Light your fucking life on fire. Burn long, burn hot.

jeffrey parker mayo,

founder of flaming house