Third date:
you think they are the spark;
pleasant pinpricks blaze up your spine when they walk you to your door
and press soft lips to the back of your hand;
a scene straight out of the cinema.
There is something precious, new, unnamed, flaring up inside you,
as you call out to them, drag them inside, ask them to stay.
Three months:
they are fire in your hearth,
not just stirrings, something settled.
Home.
While dawn has yet to pierce this hemisphere,
you are stellar, radiant.
You are starlight.
Look in the mirror, peek past your reflection into the room behind:
there they are, waiting.
You smile around toothpaste, giddy at spaces shared.
Thirteen weeks:
the flame flickers. Maybe.
Probably an illusion;
just a trick of the light.
One hundred days:
you were wrong, you were so wrong.
They are the fuel, and they are burning you down,
creating in you the aftermath of Alexandria;
years of history lost.
You are reduced to ash and cinders now, scattered in the wind
as storm clouds brew bruises on the horizon.
This morning you do not look in the mirror;
cannot bear to see the carcass that will stare back.
Your body stinks of a life that does not belong to you anymore;
an illusion of happiness that clings like smoke.
It will wash out;
it will all wash out, and you,
swept away on the tide.
Six months:
they keep your ashes on the mantle;
a warning to outsiders: fragile, do not touch.
You are a loved one lost but not forgotten –
at least at first, when hands that used to feel like home still visit,
digging into you, as if you were finger food.
They steal from you in fistfuls;
leaving palm-prints in their wake.
You are soft and brittle, used sidewalk chalk.
One day, the urn tips over:
there is no one there to pick you up.
Two hundred days:
you were wrong, you were so wrong.
It is you: the spark, the fuel, the blaze.
They are nothing.
You are self-sufficient.
They are nothing.
You are strong,
and you will burn hellfire harsh enough to blind them,
rain down like meteor shower, bring extinction.
You are here to end the world.
They are nothing, not anymore.
Post-apocalypse, the mirror shows the scope of your decay;
having halved yourself so many times,
you can feel the restless energy from each atom of your being,
all struggling to rip apart your body.
Your life matter is in civil war:
charges clash and scream, repel -
you see yourself repulsive.
But for the first time in a long time you look farther, much farther;
watch star-death make nebulae,
spread cosmic dust across light years
in a sheet of fine cobwebs.
And at the furthest edge,
atoms, once aimless, found their purpose in you -
a future.
This is not the miracle piece that completes the jigsaw puzzle;
you are still made of mismatched parts and singed edges:
but today the mirror finds your face again.
An ember stutters, ignites you and you glow.
Emily Crowley, an environmental studies major, is an amateur poet, writing mostly as a form of stress relief. She lives in Vancouver, volunteers at a cat shelter, loves tea and chocolate (especially together), and would like to thank her girlfriend, Alyssa, for the endless inspiration and support.
Dancing Fire by Irina Sztukowski