From Ashes

I was burning when you came, blaming me for the smell of ashes.

You stood there. Framed in the doorway, eyes narrowed against the thick smoke curling toward the ceiling. The walls blistered behind me; embers crackled at my feet. You never saw the fire blistering me – only the charred ruin it left behind.

“Look at this mess,” you said, stepping closer. The soles of your shoes melting into the scorched floorboards. “Look what you’ve done.”

I tried to answer, but my lungs were full of cinders, my tongue raw from the heat. You only saw destruction, and so did I.

The fire had started slowly. A whisper against the edges of my skin. A flicker of doubt, a spark of anger. The slow, creeping burn of everything I’d ever swallowed home. The things I’d never say. The things I was never allowed to be. It smouldered in my ribs for years, banked coals of quiet suffering. Until one day, it caught wind.

Until one day, I was burning.

Not in the way of stories told around campfires, where flames lick the air and die when the kindling is gone. This was my unravelling. A shedding of all that was no longer mine to carry. 

The past. 

The expectations.

The weight of your words pressing against my shoulders like damp wood resisting the spark.

You didn’t see that. You never did. You only saw the ruin. The way the fire consumed the wallpaper into curling fists, how the furniture collapsed in on itself like a body crumpling under the weight of its own exhaustion. You saw the smoke. Thick and black, the way it swallowed everything whole. 

You blamed me for the flames.

You blamed me for the ashes.

But, ashes are not the end.

Not for me. Not anymore.

For out of the ashes, I rose.