When the Fire Burned Out

The day you died

the sky felt like the inside of a spent match.

Hollowed-out and silent,

something ending, though I didn’t know what.

Not yet.

The day after my birthday in June,

humidity stuck to my throat

like the words I didn’t say to you in time.

The sun was bright, already turning toward me,

ready to go over everything we’d ever done wrong

and everything we did right,

too late.

/

My phone lit up,

a little square of fire in the palm of my hand,

as the call burned through:

He’s gone.

There should have been smoke,

alarms,

a building evacuating.

Instead, my screams cauterized my throat

and the air left my lungs with a soft hiss

like a candle someone forgot to blow out

before they lay down to rest.

/

I thought all our years together

would continue to burn,

brightly and braided as one.

Fights that flared, apologies instantaneous,

like buckets of water calming the embers.

We would laugh as the smoke cleared.

We would rebuild.

We never thought we were playing with real flames.

/

Confusion and questions sear themselves into my brain,

scars that will be forever mine.

I listen to the noise but stare past it,

at the smoke only I can see;

a shape of you in the corner,

curling up, thinning out,

leaving me. Again and again.

/

That night,

I lit a candle in my room.

I watched it crackle,

shiver,

steady,

then shrink into itself.

I watched the flame go out,

quietly and disrespectfully.

/

The dark rushed in as quickly as you left me,

and I understood:

/

the ending is not the silence after the fire,

it’s the moment you realize

you are the one left holding the matches

with no idea what to burn next.