FIREMOUTH AND MOONFACE
A personal essay about fire, language, symbols and the personas we build to carry our inner worlds. Firemouth and Moonface is a reflection on identity, grief, archetypes and the quiet power behind myth.
My mouth always puts me in a predicament. It is my toxic trait and my favorite flaw. I fall out with people, say cutthroat things, then act like I never said them. But words have meaning. They land in the body. They shift something in a person whether we want them to or not.
I have always believed most people do not actually want to harm each other. Not at the core. What comes out as aggression usually comes from unaddressed memories and the scars that sit underneath daily life. I have had my share of difficult years, so I ended up diving into the esoteric side of the world. The occult, tarot, astrology, numerology, all of it.
A woman in tech once told me the only men she had seen really learn these intuitive systems were men who had gone through loss or heartbreak. I do not know if she was right, but it made sense in a strange way. The timing was also fitting because the AI overlords arrived around the same period. Now I can challenge any blanket statement from anyone right from my phone if I want to.
Another thing I dislike in these circles is the way people use astrology to generalize whole groups. All Leos are toxic cheaters. Every Virgo is secretly miserable. People hear these things and get offended before they hear anything else. Still, I believe that if someone placed a hundred Libras in one room, the similarities would be obvious. Not because everyone is acting out a script, but because there is a real pattern there. Human psychology does not explain why people born around the same time often share a similar emotional temperature. To me, that much coincidence stops being coincidence.
Anyway, let me step off the soapbox.
I walked into an occult shop in a hipster district that looked like something from a Victorian film set. Strange objects with old symbols pulled me in. I saw the symbol for Mercury carved on a talisman. Its history goes back to two serpents wrapped around a staff before the Church added the cross to make it more acceptable to medieval Christians. And during the golden age of the Arab and Persian Muslim world, astrology was actually respected as a serious science by polymaths like Albumasar. It is only now, in the twenty first century, that many Christians and Muslims are united in condemning the very systems their ancestors once guarded.
The truth is I was in that store to manifest a kind of primordial power. Yes, I probably sound like a lunatic. The word itself comes from luna. Maybe I sound like I am trying to be a discount Moon Knight. But this is my reality. I built a symbolic persona for myself named Firemouth.
I am looking for the other half of the story. Moonface. That is what I call her in my mind. A bit like Sailor Moon, but grown, with the kind of presence that makes my internal chaos sit still for once. When I picture her bright eyes and calm expression, all I feel is the instinct to protect, support, and move with purpose.
If life is kind, and we ever have a child, maybe we will call them Sunbeam. Not as a joke but as a small inheritance of who we were when we imagined them.
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