After the Last Flame

By the time the fire is down

to one thin tongue of orange,

The room has already started

remembering the dark.

We sit inside the slow collapse

of light—log surrendering to ember,

ember crumbling into whispers

too soft to warm the hands.

Smoke writes its vanishing script

along the rafters, a gray farewell

spelled in a language

No one ever learns in time.

This is how endings happen:

not with doors slammed,

But with heat quietly returning

What it borrowed from the air.

Your voice, once bright as kindling,

flickers in the gaps between us.

We talk in the past tense now.

as if the future were a house

We’ve already moved out of.

Still, in the ash

a red pulse hides,

breathing like a secret:

even ruin keeps a heartbeat

for the next beginning.

When at last the final coal

dims to a dull stone of itself,

We don’t clap, or cry, or speak.

We just watch the last small glow

let go of its own name,

and feel the darkness

settle in—

not as an enemy,

But as a place

to see new stars from.