Ashes From a Fire that Refuses to Die

She said she would buy the flowers herself.

The Morning

Despite saying this, she did not really go out for flowers. Mornings are too precious to waste on such errands. In one of the most precious moments of life — a normal morning in September — the mind was sharpest, while the world was chilling and still. Given both circumstances hold true, her pen could move across the page with a kind of urgency that only the dawn understood.

She needed to write. The flowers could wait.

Writing was the work that burned within her like the fire she stoked each morning on the stove.

She set the fire deliberately, watching the flames catch and grow. The wood crackled and popped giving off its heat and light. There was something about the ritual of the woods — how the fire turned this solid, sturdy object into fragile, floating ash. She stared at it like observing a life of her own.

Each day, thoughts crowd her mind, chaotic and overwhelming. She tamed them and made them into something beautiful — something dancing on the page like the flames dancing in the hearth.

But it burned, each time.

Attention drawn by the vibrant fire, it was hard to notice the woods were fading away. She watched the ashes pile up, gray and delicate, almost weightless. She felt a pang — a recognition of something that is both an ending and a beginning.

She wrote down:

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

The heat has spent itself.

The Night

As the day faded into night, she returned to herself. The luckiest thing in the world — she had a private space where the external world was shut down, and her thoughts ran wild. She was left alone with her mind. This was her diary time.

Diary means reflection; it is the place where you can pour out all the things you cannot say out loud, all the secrets hidden beneath the surface.

Genies envie freedom. Psycho suffers attacked — raising doubts and fears that never quite leave her. They tried to bury the sparkling thoughts.

Why do you live?

What do you live for.

Why do you still live, even burned?

The sufferings were strong. But what had been even stronger was a deep, unshakable sense of being, of who she is and what she stands for.

For the right to own her own room.

For purely and proudly, being a woman.

She fully understood that the world did not easily bend to the will of women; it sought to confine them instead.

For what?

For making them small, reducing them to ashes.

But she was not so easily diminished. Fires are fires that equally play with all woods: they burn bright and true, even in the face of her doubts, and her fears.

She talked to herself against the genies:

“Even if I mean to turn ash, I’d rather be one that refuses to die.”

She closed her diary. The flames settled into the quiet of the night like nothing happened as usual. She returned to the stove.

Ashes became a fragile reminder of what once was. With the fire long since extinguished, they became something more, something extraordinary:

They held the memories of a bright fire that had burned, given warmth, and transformed.

They were proof of the fire’s power that once shed light on all.

They were not an ending; they were a beginning, a promise of what is yet to come.

She decided not to give up yet then, silently during that night.

She planned to buy the flowers herself, tomorrow.