The Flame Takes You Back

Hush—
the fire is speaking.
Not in words,
but in the soft, hungry sound
light makes
when it remembers
it wasn’t born to last.

Lean closer.
Not too close.
Just enough to feel
how heat becomes warning,
how warning becomes want,
how want becomes the slow slide
toward ending.

Every life begins in a spark.
You think it’s chance.
It isn’t.
Flames don’t choose to burn—
they are summoned.
Woken.
Fed.
Used.

And the dark waits.
Always waits.
Listening for the first tremble
in the center of your glow.

You will tremble.
Every flame does.
That small, secret shake
that says the wick is thinning,
the breath is shortening,
the body is remembering
what silence feels like.

Don’t look away.
Don’t pretend the fire flares for you.
It flares because it’s dying.
That’s what the last burn is—
a final reaching,
a desperate brightening
before the fall inward.

Hear it.
The crackle.
The hitch.
The faint gasp of a flame
that knows your name
and knows
it will not say it again.

The dark moves closer.
Slow.
Patient.
Gentle in the way only predators are.
It doesn’t blow the flame out—
no.
It waits for the fire
to understand
it has nothing left to give.

This is the moment endings are made from:
the inward curl of heat,
the collapse of light,
the soft release of smoke
sliding upward like a soul
too tired to deny its leaving.

Watch—
the glow folds in on itself.
A whisper of ember.
A shiver of almost.
Then nothing.
Not a scream.
Not a struggle.
Just the quiet truth
of something going back
to where it came from.

Hush—
every death ends as a fading flame.
And every flame,
once it dies,
whispers one final truth
into the dark:

You will return to me.
All heat does.
All light does.
All life—
eventually—
comes home.