We Burned Our Diaries and Danced in the Smoke

We did it under the moonlight because we wanted the stars to watch.

It was the last night of school, the last night of being who they told us to be. Tomorrow, we’d walk across a stage in navy blue robes and shake hands with people who never really looked at us. But tonight—tonight belonged to us.

We met in the clearing behind the old gymnasium, the one where the grass had stopped growing years ago and nothing ever bloomed. A place for discards and defiance. There were nine of us. Ten if you counted Ruth’s little sister, who followed her everywhere and was always just quiet enough to be forgotten. But she remembered everything.

Each of us carried something in our backpacks: a journal, a diary, a collection of pages stuffed into shoeboxes and stashed beneath beds. All the things we were told not to feel, or think, or say. The things that wouldn’t look good in college applications. The confessions we whispered into pillowcases or scribbled into margins while pretending to pay attention in biology.

Hannah had a purple leather-bound book filled with poems about her stepmother’s hands and her father’s silence.

Jay’s notebook had sketch after sketch of boys with sad eyes and bruised lips, drawn in math class while the teacher talked about formulas for futures we didn’t believe in.

Elena brought loose pages scrawled in two languages—one her parents understood and one they didn’t.

I brought three years of spiral notebooks, one for each grade since everything started going wrong.

We lit the fire with a match Ruth had stolen from her uncle’s garage. She struck it like it owed her something. When the first pages curled in the flames, it was like watching old versions of ourselves scream silently before vanishing into smoke.

At first, it was quiet. Reverent. As if we were mourning something.

But then Elena started to laugh. Not softly, but in a wild, sharp burst that split the night like a siren.

“Do you know what I wrote about in here?” she said, holding up a page before throwing it into the fire. “How I used to think my mother was going to find out I kissed a girl and set the house on fire. I actually thought she’d kill me.”

“She didn’t though,” Jay said.

“She didn’t. You know why?” Elena said, spinning in place, arms wide open. “Because she already knew. And it was her house, not mine. So I let it burn.”

That was when the dancing started.

First it was just Ruth, barefoot in the dirt, swaying in a rhythm only she could hear. Then it was Hannah, her long skirt trailing smoke as she spun around the fire. Then Jay. Then me. Then all of us.

We danced like we were trying to stomp out our shame. Like we were kicking at the memory of every person who told us to be smaller. Every time they said we were too loud, too angry, too soft, too much.

We danced with smoke in our lungs and sweat on our faces. We danced until the fire caught our voices and made them louder. Until Ruth screamed, “I’m not sorry,” and no one asked her what for, because we weren’t sorry either.

And when the fire burned bright enough, we each said the one thing we had never written down. The thing too sacred or too dangerous to put on paper.

“I hate the way my father looks at me now,” Jay said, eyes on the flames. “Like I’m a cracked mirror.”

“I used to starve myself so I could feel in control of something,” whispered Hannah.

“My grandfather touched me,” Ruth said. And no one looked away.

“I didn’t cry when my mother died,” I said. “And sometimes I still feel relieved.”

We said the unspeakable and the sky didn’t fall. The world didn’t shatter. The fire just kept eating our secrets and turning them into ash.

Ruth’s little sister stood by the edge of the fire, holding something small and pink in her hands. A diary she’d started last year. She looked at all of us, big-eyed and quiet, and then tossed it into the flames.

“You sure?” Ruth asked her.

She nodded. “I remember everything anyway.”

When the fire finally died down, and there was nothing left but smoldering ash and the ghosts of who we used to be, we sat in a circle and let the silence wrap around us like a blanket. Not because we had nothing to say, but because we finally didn’t need to explain ourselves.

In the morning, our eyes would sting from smoke and our hair would smell like defiance. They would put diplomas in our hands and say, “You did it,” without knowing what we had actually done.