the last time we spoke, he called me “shrapnel” and the way his tongue curled around the word made me glad to be explosive. he told me once that the way she moaned implosion on his neck made him feel like an atom bomb. looking back on this past summer, all i see is red. honestly, i never asked for him, and he never asked for me, but circumstance and fate had a heated argument and we were the resolution. i had never fallen in love before, and while he walked around with “trouble” tattooed on his wrists and an arsonist’s grin, i found something calm within him. no one warned me that summer will simultaneously kiss your cheeks and break your heart. by then, i had already spent years and years cutting the thorns off of roses before he came along and asked me why i wasn’t planting sunflowers to begin with. i still don't have an adequate answer. on our first date, he told me that aspiration is a characteristic of the flames that burn down thousand year old cathedrals and ambition is a trait of the inferno. i asked if him the hollowed out stone bodies of these houses of god still flinch at the strike of a match. he didn’t know, but he kissed me and i think i figured it out. together, we were mushroom clouds, firecrackers on the fourth of july, smoldering camp fires. we were blazing and bright, flaming and fervent. but now summer has ended, and the flames have died. like a smothered candle, there was no fight. no fire. luminescent absolution was where i found myself when sticky, sweet summers and screened in doors hiding broken intimacy came to meet. i was ready for guns blazing and violence: darling, arson was always my specialty. i’d rather him set fire to my lungs and watch the rest of me ignite than calmly say goodbye and walk away.  these sparks escaping from my chest are from the wildfires within me and also my lust for incendiarism. i know it’s over but i’m still lit up like a cigarette, wishing to be crushed by his lips again, to be on the tip of his tongue again. we were a fiery bed, and i found comfort in the ashes and embers. the last time we spoke, he called me “shrapnel” and the way his tongue curled around the word made me glad to be explosive. but shrapnel is just another result of the fire, a repercussion of getting too close to something volatile. shrapnel is for survivors. shrapnel is for those who walk away. i am many things, combusted and burnt out, but i am not shrapnel.