The Fire You Started

You lit the match, and I stood in the blaze—
too naïve to read the smoke as warning,
too eager to feel anything
that looked like warmth.

We lay in our attic of half-kept things,
TV humming its soft static snow.
We tuned our energy to different channels,
still far from merging,
reaching across the static for some kind of signal.

Your eyes clouded with smoke;
I choked on the words we’d spoken.
You whispered heat that melted the frost
from places I kept hidden—
whispers laced with gasoline.

It was your flame that set us ablaze,
and then the room turned charcoal—
bottle on the table, screen aglow,
your shadows moving like I wasn’t there,
talking around me as if I were air,
writing me villain into your private tale.

You crawled back through tangled sheets
after other beds, other lies,
promising last times
Yet promises were like seals on leaking doors
our love reduced to a dead-end code,
TV reruns and repeating records. 

Breaking away was the only clear choice.
I chose the door,
even as your foot jammed the frame,
even as you flipped the script—
blaming me for wanting more
than smoke and static.

I let you ignite me,
believing I was becoming light.
But the glow was only burn,
and what I carried after
were ashes shaped like love—
singed fragments of a story
where I mistook fire for touch.

You never stayed
to watch me extinguish.
You never saw
how I learned the language of water,
how I rebuilt from cinder and breath,
how I stacked each cooled ember
into something that shelters.

The sandbags you stacked around your heart
couldn’t keep the river from changing course.
We were never merging;
we were learning to part.

It was you who started the fire—
and somehow, that set me free.
I walked out with what still glowed true,
left the rest to smoke and memory,
and lit a smaller, kinder light
I could live by.