I Choose To Burn

I didn’t see it leave. It had made a home in the hollows of me that quiet monster, all teeth and impatience, teaching my heart to live in half-light, teaching my body how to brace for what it already knew would end.

I thought it was permanent. Thought it had grown from my bones. Until one morning I breathed in and nothing breathed back.

No weight. No shadow circling the softest parts of me. No presence pretending to be protection.

Just space where something unnamed had finally loosened its grip.

And in that space, I found it—not ruin, not absence, but a small, living flame.

Still burning. Still mine. It flickers in the center of my chest, unafraid now, no longer hidden behind fear or hunger.

I carry it carefully. Not to give away, not to prove it survived,

but because I know now it was never meant to burn alone.

It waits— not desperately just steadily,

for the hands that will recognize its warmth, that will not try to consume it, but sit beside it, and tend to it like something sacred and real.