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Even as a child, freezing between the snow-capped peaks you called home, you knew to shy away from fire. It was one of the first things you remember learning from your parents—It may look pretty, dancing and weaving and spitting sparks, but you were not made to embrace it and live.
You'd never had a problem with that. Never really could see the draw of the flickering candlelight, the glow of the crackling fireplace. For all the time you've spent in the kitchen, watching then learning then doing, you've never burned yourself. In that regard, their warnings worked.
Their mistake was not warning you about everything else. Sometimes you wonder if you're just a fool, if you're falling into traps so obvious they were never worth pointing out. They'd told you to avoid fire. They'd told you the sun was a flaming, nurturing blaze.
You'd never put the pieces together, you suppose. Instead, you embrace its rays with layers of sunscreen smeared over your skin, a cap pulled low over your brow, respites into shaded canopies when you really couldn't take it anymore. In the grand scheme of everything you'd sacrificed for tennis, the sun wasn't much of an issue. Except when it was, except when it left you shaking, overheated, vomiting; except you somehow still never recognized it.
Except, you think, the sun is more than just blistering heat and scalding glares. It's the burst of a forehand fired down the line, just barely too fast for you to return; the all-too-familiar pop of a drop shot that you rush to catch; the feel of arms around your neck and a blinding smile aimed at you.
You feel the sun beaming high above; you look across the net and stare it in the face. You let yourself fall into its embrace, scalding every inch of your body, and you do not flinch back. You let tongue and teeth and hands lick across your skin, into your mouth, then down, down, down. You press on the burns you earn, dull and purple instead of shiny and red.
Your hair lights aflame in the sun. You light ablaze in the sun. It leaves you gasping and reaching and pushing for more. You beat back its flares just for it to roar back brighter and more vicious, serves blitzing toward you to rip the cool relief of control from your hands. It feels like an inevitability when you collapse under its heat again.
You wake up to the sun streaming in through the window, wrapped around you, engulfing your very being. It's not fire, but it burns nonetheless. You wonder if your parents foresaw this all those years ago, tried to warn you about the flames just for you to obey and never truly understand. You'd never seen the beauty in fire, never learned to see past the draw of something golden and radiant, and now you're hopelessly trapped in the grasp of something far more destructive.
You still haven't learned to shy from the beam of the sun itself.