ashes to ashes
Fire crawls on her skin, reaches for her face. Curls around her as if curious. Why, it asks.
Why?
Leaves curl inward, folding upon itself. An attempt to shy away from the destruction. Futile, she thinks, but admirable.
Oranges and reds and yellows swirl like paint on a canvas, leaving behind a wasteland. White becomes black, life becomes death. The fire rages onward. It overcomes, overwhelms, overwrites –
– everything.
The tallest tree, the smallest flower, the most pathetic weed. Destroy all, spare none. Memory of the heat remains even long after it’s gone, after it’s gorged itself.
In the charred stumps and barren meadows. In the suffocated, blackened carcasses. In the dirt-that’s-not-quite-dirt-anymore, having been sown with the offspring of its carnage.
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
With life comes death – and with death comes life. Some call it a cycle, as constant as it is unpredictable. Not a perfect circle, no; nothing in existence is perfect.
But, to her, it’s about as perfect as it gets.
Green grows out of the black. Brown seeps through the grey. The world breathes again.
From ashes we came.
Breathe in, breathe out. Live, die. Repeat.
The fire returns with impunity. There is no fear, no pause in its hypnotic dance as it leaps from treetop to treetop. From body to body. The air chokes on itself.
See the nearly-blinding colors. Feel the oppressive heat. Smell the thick smoke. Hear the crackle and roar. Taste the flavor of the dust that lands on the tongue.
To ashes we shall return.
So close. So far.
It continues to circle her, frame her body. Embraces her like a lover, but never truly able to give to her what she wants. She can only watch from afar, observing the cycle of life and death.
There is no one more intimately familiar. There is no one so heartbreakingly distant.
Always dying, never dead. Always alive, never living.
Fires aren’t supposed to burn forever.
nomderonge liked this
holy-spirited reblogged this from irarum-blog
irarum-blog posted this