What The Fire Leaves

The fire does not end all at once.

It learns how to let go.

First, the loud parts leave—

the snapping, the reaching tongues of light

that once believed they could outlive the dark.

What remains is a smaller language:

a hush,

a pulse,

a glow that knows its time is thinning.

I watch it from a careful distance,

as if endings might flare back up

if stared at too closely.

This fire once warmed my hands.

Once taught me how to gather near something living.

Once convinced me that closeness

was the same as permanence.

Now it lowers itself,

not defeated,

just finished.

The wood remembers longer than the flame does.

You can see it in the way embers hold their shape—

how red insists on staying red

even as it darkens.

Even as it forgets how to speak.

There are endings like this.

Not violent.

Not dramatic.

Just the quiet withdrawal of effort.

No final announcement.

No apology.

Only the soft consent of heat

becoming memory.

Ash settles the way truth does

after everything unnecessary has burned away.

Light enough to scatter,

heavy enough to stain the hands of anyone

who reaches back too late.

I think about all the things I asked the fire to be:

a signal,

a shelter,

a promise it never made.

But it gave me what it could—

warmth while it lasted,

light while it knew how,

and this final lesson:

That endings are not always collapse.

Sometimes they are refinement.

Sometimes they are the moment

you realize nothing more needs to be added.

The last glow dims.

The night steps forward.

What remains is not empty.

It is clear.

And in the quiet where the fire once stood,

I understand—

the ending did not erase the flame.

It taught it how to rest.