There is a fire I carry -
not born of warmth,
but something scorched awake
in the marrow
when your voice first split the air.
You taught me the chemistry of burning:
how a single word can strike
like a flint against the ribs,
how a breath can become tinder,
how a body can smoulder
without ever making smoke.
I learned to swallow heat,
to keep the blaze contained-
a quiet pyre stacked
behind the sternum.
Every memory hissed
like a match dropped in oil,
every silence flared
with its own cruel oxygen.
Some days the flames crack inward,
eating the shape of who I was
with a greedy, deliberate mouth.
Other days they surge upward,
molten, merciless,
as if my pulse were nothing
but bellows for the past.
But there is a cleansing in the fire too-
a way it burns the rot to ash,
a way it strips the name of suffering
down to a bright bare truth.
I walk through the heat
until the heat learns my name
and no longer owns me.
When I exhale now,
sparks fall away-
the remnants of old obedience,
old fear,
old shadows that once claimed
the shape of my skin.
I am not untouched
I am not unscarred,
but I rise from the cinders
with a steadiness you never had-
a body tempered,
a mouth full of embers,
a heart refusing to go out.