The Flame Remembers

The table was set. Everything in its place, like a ritual I once knew by heart. I looked at the torch and hesitated—not from fear of the fire, but from what the fire had once meant.

“Take your time,” my friend murmured, her voice just above the hum of anticipation. Her fingers tapped a gentle rhythm on the edge of the bench, the way she always did when she was being patient without making a point of it.

I didn’t breathe. Not yet. The scent of annealing blankets and mandrels took me back before I could blink. Back to late nights filled with colors so vivid they drowned out the dark, and laughter that didn’t yet echo.

Back to them.

They had walked into my life like a spark onto dry tinder—bright, hot, impossible to ignore. From the start, there was a gravity to them, the kind of pull that artists mistake for destiny. They didn’t just want to learn—they consumed. Every technique, every trick, every shortcut I had learned over decades. They studied the flame like it was sacred scripture, and I let them.

I was so damn proud.

They mirrored me. Reflected back all the good parts, all the best hopes I had for someone like me, someone broken, someone burned who still found joy in the heat.

But reflections can lie.

“Need me to light it for you?” my friend asked again, softer now.

“No.” My voice was steel wrapped in memory. “I need to do this.”

The hiss of the flame snapped me into the present. Bright, sharp, hungry. The torch demanded presence, precision. And truth.

I picked up a rod. Soft lavender with a hint of silver laced through it—fragile, deceptive, beautiful. Like trust.

Back then, I’d believed every smile, every confession, every trembling word about escaping their past. I gave them my studio, my knowledge, my heart. I told myself they weren’t like the others. That their scars were just deeper, not darker.

I ignored the signs. The manipulation tucked inside compliments. The guilt layered into praise. The increasing entitlement. The way my tools became theirs, my time became theirs, my identity was slowly whittled down until all I had left to give was yes.

And when I said no?

They vanished. Not with grace, but with fury. As if I had stolen something from them—as if my boundaries were betrayal.

The first bead clung to the mandrel like grief. Uneven. Tentative. I let it form without judgment.

“I always loved your hands at the torch,” they once said. “Like you’re dancing with fire.”

And they tried to mimic the steps.

But some people don’t dance—they choreograph control.

I spun the rod in the flame, watching the shape emerge. Molten memory, solidifying slowly.

“I’ve seen worse,” my friend teased, nudging me with a smile that held no pretense, only patience.

The second bead was cleaner. Tighter. Confidence creeping back in with every turn. There was no ghost here now. Just me, and the work.

I remembered the good times. I don’t pretend they weren’t real. The stolen hours under twilight skies, breathless from laughter, high off the pure alchemy of turning raw material into beauty. I remember believing we were building something bigger than beads.

But I also remember the end. And the silence that followed.

“You’re back,” my friend said, seeing it before I did.

I was. And not just to the torch.

I was back to myself.

The third bead was almost perfect—not in its symmetry, but in what it represented. A reclaiming. A resurrection.

There are people who wear masks so well, you forget they’re masks. But masks slip. And when they do, the truth scorches.

I was ashes for a while. But glass knows something about fire. It knows how to soften, to bend, to become. I am still glass—still fragile in some ways, but fused now. Stronger at the broken points.

“I kept the kit,” I told her. “All this time. I couldn’t open it, but I couldn’t let it go either.”

“You don’t have to forget them,” she said. “You just don’t have to carry them.”

I looked at the row of beads, imperfect but mine. New Creation Energy hummed in my fingertips. And for the first time in years, I didn’t think about teaching them, impressing them, saving them.

I thought about what I wanted to make next.

The mask is gone.

The game is over.

And the flame remembers—but now, so do I.