myth for stinging nettle

Every moment for five years I have been working day and night, with bouts of fitfull rest. I have become used to fatigue. Pale, with bags under my eyes I return to the lab, or wake up from the lab couch with a drive that sometimes scares me. I love it, and then I feel that I will never be free from it. I want an impossible thing, yet everything else in my life has fallen away and every sacrifice will be for nothing if I cannot fabricate this fire. Even as I eat I taste the alcohol on my hands: the substitutes for potassium, the acid of nitrate. I pray I have not ingested enough so that I might stop - in death. That is the only thing that will halt my drive. I have worked through pain. 

I have been looking for so many years of fires that I see them in my sleep. But every time I return to them in my waking life I do not see the flame that I am looking for - never the chartreuse glow of lithgia - the source and only forge for lendless. The bowl which lies broken on my night table. It broke the day I left and our home was destroyed. It took me hours when I returned that day and as day fell and the stars peered through the bluing evening. I smelled smoke then and I have not stopped smelling smoke - not one day since. And my family never returned.

The land is raucous summer and I am staring at its fury with a sandwich on the plate before me. There is a strange kind of calm in me. There are sometimes moments like these when I imagine giving up - when I imagine walking into the greenery and becoming nothing but land like so many people I loved. 

That is when I realize that I smell smoke - and simultaneously realize I have not smelled smoke in the hours leading up to this moment. It dawns on me slowly. All the underbrush outside my window, and out into the woods beyond burns green. Every plant is fire. I feel tears well in my eyes and stream down my cheeks. How long it took me to arrive here and yet here I am. I wonder if I will soon die from the smoke or live more fully as a result of it. I run to the broken bowl, so still on my table, and kneel to the ground before the flames. It hurts more than I can say. I watch the green flame engulf and suture the sharp sides. I nearly faint from the scent as it smolders and burns, I believe I may become blind from regarding it.

I try to make a map, now, of the years. To understand the methods I used to make the green fire. Sometimes I wonder if it was my actions at all that brought it forth. It burns still, with toothy green flames and balls of ash flying off of it all outside my home. You may call it stinging nettle. It was, for me, my last hope.