on burning

Had my heart stopped I never would have known it. Had my luck changed it was far too late to tell. Your words somehow lingered in the empty room, your breath having forever altered the atmosphere. Leaving your scent, your sense, your flavor clinging to all that was once familiar. Leaving in your absence this tumult in my notions of feeling, this staggering insistent impression, the feel of your gaze entangled with mine. The feel of your lips refusing to linger, that maddening realization of mistaken inference, suddenly to be on the wrong side of unrequited.

It is a fearsome magic, to be suddenly in a wish come true. The realization that desire has worked against you all along. The knowledge that sometimes having exactly what you want does nothing for you at all. The awareness that some breaks will not heal stronger, and that everything left is salted in tiresome curses and diminishing returns. Measured less by magnitudes, now that the first hurt has done its best to heal. How embarrassing to be wishing after that same demolition still.

Trace the absence of my touch. Feel the mechanical hum of my imagination lingering on and on over the storm of your skin. The words you spat out with such distaste, a tell in the way the world had worked you, a map of how to find you always. You will have forgotten most of what was left of me, the awkward stillness, the willful denial. But you will remember how bright I shone, holding your gaze. How the things I said thought about you seemed so wrong as to be either mistakes or lies. Meet your own eyes in the mirror, know that they were neither. Learn at last the nature of the magic you devote your prayers to, when that last spell you cast is roosting upon the line some rough dusk. When the time spent winds up as lost as that list of reasons, and there is no hearth to hold these flames you can not extinguish.