Fire and Air Compatibility

Fire and air: the fastest of the ten, and the easiest to spend in talk.

A good question arrives and something in the chest lifts, and fire answers hotter than it meant to, and air comes back sharper for having been answered. The exchange accelerates on its own. Neither of you has to work at it, which is the first thing you should be suspicious of and the last thing you will be.

Nobody has to slow down here. The joke lands on the half-beat, the reference is caught before it has finished arriving, and the two of you can hold that pitch for hours without either one flagging.

Hours pass at that pitch and the mouth is tired and the mind is bright and the body has not been touched, or fed, or allowed to be slow. Underneath there is a small unattended ache neither of you looked at, because looking would have meant stopping, and stopping is the one speed you have not practised together.

There is a second cost. Fire settles a thing by doing it; air keeps it open because open is where thinking lives. So a decision gets discussed brilliantly and repeatedly and never made, and fire starts burning on the spot rather than toward anything.

What are you avoiding by keeping the conversation this good?

The pleasure of being met at speed is real and you should not talk yourselves out of it. It is simply not the same as being known slowly, and years can go by mistaking the first for the second.

You use the momentum for different reasons. One of you to feel alive, the other to stay above the part that thinking cannot reach. Neither reason is a flaw, and both keep you moving past the same door.

Speed is its own pleasure, and it can carry a whole decade.

When was the last time the two of you were quiet together and it was not awkward?