Heart on fire, ashes everywhere*

Darling, sometimes love is a battle that you are fighting from both sides. Your heart is two hemispheres, reaching for separate outcomes. The world spins on the axis of your erratic pulse. Close your eyes, and it is all stardust – the burning out of a star from millions of years ago. Forget the armor. Forget crest you once wore. All honor changes with time, and what you love demands its own worth. Take a breath, and show yourself how you feel. Unclench your fists and fight that way: without weapons. It is a risk. It is one way to break your own heart. It is also the most beautiful way you can save it.

Tell the truth. Do not tell it slant. Peel it out of every word you’ve been too afraid to say. This is your story. This is proof that good people do terrible things. Sometimes, a broken promise is a miracle. It is water changed to wine, stone changed into a heart, and a love so fierce that takes the place of a pain so vicious. Mistakes are how we learn to breathe again. Nothing clean is ever quite true. Worship the knife edge, the spilled coffee, and the feel of fingers slipping into your hand.

Sometimes, the map is half-burnt, and you are wandering in circles. Sometimes, you are an ocean made of someone else’s desires. Sometimes, you light the funeral pyre yourself to put somebody else’s mind at ease. There are a hundred different ways a soul can burn. There are a hundred different ways a soul can swim. But of all the secrets, this one is the truest: love is a forest fire, and we are all the driest of trees.

I can still taste the ashes in my mouth from the last time you kissed me.

*”Heart on fire, ashes everywhere
— there’s no return from a red like that.” ~ “Fado Menor” by Manuel de Freitas