When the Fire Finishes Speaking

At the end, it is never silence—

it is heat.

A flame does not apologize

for what it takes with it.

It consumes the letter, the photograph,

the careful stack of days we thought were permanent.

Paper curls. Names blacken.

Meaning loosens its grip.

Fire is honest that way.

It doesn’t pretend endings are gentle.

At first, we call it destruction.

We say everything is gone,

as if gone means erased.

But watch closely—

how the flame hesitates before surrender,

how it flickers like it’s remembering

what it used to be before it was lit.

Endings burn unevenly.

Some parts refuse to catch.

Some memories glow longer than they should,

embers stubborn as grief.

You can stamp them out,

scatter the ash,

and still feel warmth hours later

in places you didn’t know could ache.

A fire is a conversation between

what was solid

and what can no longer stay.

Wood learns the truth of itself

only when it breaks into light.

What survives is not the shape,

but the heat it leaves behind

in the hands that reached too close.

There is always a moment—

just before the flame collapses—

when it is brightest.

As if endings need one last declaration:

This mattered.

A final flare against the dark,

defiant, extravagant,

unwilling to disappear quietly.

Then comes the settling.

Ash where structure once stood.

Smoke thinning into the ordinary sky.

The world pretending nothing happened,

as it always does.

But ash is not nothing.

It is proof.

It is what remains when fire has said

everything it needed to say.

The soil will take it back,

feed something new,

even if it doesn’t resemble what was lost.

And that is how endings live on—

not as absence,

but as warmth remembered,

as smoke in the lungs,

as the quiet knowledge

that once, something burned hard enough

to change the air forever.