The Unmaking

There was a time I would have thrown myself

into the flames to save what burned there.

The photographs, the promises, the careful architecture

of a life I thought would stand forever.

Now I watch it all catch fire

and I do not move to stop it.

Is this wisdom or is this weariness?

I cannot tell anymore. Perhaps

they are the same thing wearing different masks.

The fire takes the curtains first,

those blue ones we argued over, you insisting

on light, me wanting darkness, both of us

certain our way was the only way to live.

How small that argument seems now,

watching the fabric burn and blacken,

neither light nor dark but gone.

It takes the table where we ate in silence

more nights than I can count, each of us

reading our separate books, pretending

we were still together. The wood splits

and sparks, releases years of unspoken words

into the air like prayers no god bothered to answer.

I should feel something, shouldn't I?

Grief or rage or the deep ache of loss.

Instead, there is only this strange relief,

this lightness, as if I too am smoke

finally allowed to rise, to dissipate,

to become something other than what I was.

The fire does not discriminate.

It takes the good with the bad,

the love letters and the accusations,

the wedding gifts and the broken plates,

the hope and the disappointment,

all of it feeding the same hungry flame.

Perhaps this is what endings really are.

Not a door closing but a burning down,

a complete erasure, so thorough

that nothing remains to return to,

no ruins to sift through looking for

some piece of what we were.

I used to think fire was the cruelest element.

Now I understand it as a kind of mercy.

It does not leave us with choices,

with the terrible thought of deciding

what to keep and what to release.

It decides for us. It takes everything

and asks nothing in return but distance,

but the willingness to stand back

and let it do its work.

Tomorrow I will walk away from these ashes.

I will not look back, not because

I am strong, but because there will be

nothing left to see. The fire will have

finished what we could not finish ourselves.

And maybe that is the gift it offers.

Not destruction, but completion.

Not an ending we would have chosen,

but an ending nonetheless, clean and absolute,

leaving us no choice but to begin again

somewhere else, as someone else,

unburdened by what we carried here.

The flames are dying now.

The smoke thins and scatters.

Soon there will be only silence

and the space where something used to be.

I am ready for that space.

I am ready to be empty.

I am ready for the fire to finish

what love could not.