Things You Can’t Burn

By Amir

They tell me it was an electrical fire. A forgotten wire in the wall, a spark where there should’ve been silence. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe the house had just had enough—of me, of the memories soaked into the wallpaper, of the dreams too heavy for old beams to carry.

Whatever the cause, it’s gone now.

Everything is.

The house burned to the ground last Thursday while I was out buying groceries and pretending I still had an appetite. The fire took the walls, the roof, the bed I hadn’t shared in two years. It took the framed photograph of my mother at nineteen, her eyes defiant even in sepia. It took the journals I had kept since middle school. It took the wedding dress I never wore, tucked away in the attic next to boxes labeled “someday.”

But there are things it didn’t take.

There are things you can’t burn.

You can’t burn love—even the kind that doesn’t last. You can torch the letters and the dried flowers and the handmade Valentine’s cards folded unevenly by shaking hands, but not the way it felt to be chosen, even briefly. Not the way his voice used to soften when he called me "home." That stays. That aches. That flickers in the dark like a candle you forgot to blow out.

You can’t burn shame. It clings tighter than smoke. It lives in the spaces behind your ribs. The dress you wore when you said yes to something you didn’t want. The voicemail you left when you were too drunk to spell your name. The job you quit without a plan. The apology you never gave. Those aren’t in the ashes—they’re etched into your skin.

Regret? Fireproof. It doesn’t burn; it brands. It stings in flashes, like embers carried by the wind: what if, what if, what if. What if I hadn’t left the candle burning that night in December? What if I’d answered when Mom called that last time? What if I’d loved myself sooner, or later, or just more correctly?

And then there’s freedom. That one surprised me.

Freedom is strange when it shows up like this—smelling of smoke, wearing only what you wore when you walked out the door that morning. Freedom is not a clean slate; it’s a scorched one. Still, there’s something seductive about having nothing left to lose.

I stood at the edge of the property that night, surrounded by flashing lights and the far-off sound of someone else's crying. I think it was me. The neighbors gathered at a polite distance, their faces glowing orange from the fire trucks. I felt like a zoo exhibit: Traumatized Woman, Mid-Thirties, Species: Human, Habitat: Former. But all I could think was: what happens next?

What happens when the version of you that lived in those walls has nowhere else to go?

You write, I guess.

You sit on borrowed furniture in a borrowed room wearing someone else’s hoodie, and you try to remember what mattered. What was real. What was yours.

I remember my father's laugh. You can't burn that.

I remember my sister teaching me how to braid hair. You can't burn that either.

I remember crying in the school bathroom after being called a name I wouldn’t understand until much later. That, too, remains unscathed.

Some things are unflammable by design.

Hope, for example. Hope is like mold—it hides in the damp corners, refuses to die. You think it’s gone, and then it sprouts again, green and stubborn.

Anger. Oh, fire loves anger. But it doesn’t kill it. It only feeds it.

Forgiveness? That one’s tricky. Sometimes it feels like ash, soft and settled. Other times, it’s a log still smoldering long after the flames have died down.

But here’s what I’m learning:

A home is not its hardwood floors or its gallery wall. A person is not their possessions. And loss, while cruel, is also clarifying.

You don’t get to choose what survives the fire.

But you do get to choose what you rebuild with.

Maybe this time, I’ll build something smaller. Lighter. Maybe I’ll leave the shame outside and let the regret stay buried beneath the soil where nothing grows.

Maybe I’ll frame today, not the past.

Maybe I’ll write my mother’s name in every corner.

Maybe I’ll stop saving the good candles.

Because there are things you can’t burn.

And some of them are the only things worth keeping.