Burn with Me

No one ever tells you about the inevitability of falling out of love. The emphasis is always on the rose petals, the whispers, the silk sheets and caresses and lips locking with a heat that burns through all of the long-dead shreds at the center of you. You always hear about the healing, the golden glow of discovering a new dawn, of becoming something made of two parts instead of halves. But what about when the sun sets on that fiery flash of soul's collide? What about the days that drag in dreary repetition, slagging steps toward the final flare, before that love tastes of nothing but bitter ash on your tongue?

We all do love to burn.

We all do love to pretend that the flames will never bank, that there will always be fuel for more fire.

But forests aren't infinite in the same way as death and decay. When you've harvested every last twig, you'll find yourself blinking in disbelief at the sullen stumps around your feet. And you might claw at the earth, dig free those dregs, fling them into the flame... if only so you can burn a little brighter, a little longer.

It may be a slow burn, a gentle feeding of sticks into the hunger, stretching that quiet love for many years, but it's usually a forest fire, gobbling up everything in sight. It is all-consuming and soul-searing, but when it's over, you'll find yourself in a barren wasteland.

And then you will begin to hurt.

And if you're one of the lucky ones, you might begin to hate a little.

You might shovel from that ashen ground and fling black charcoal into the pit of your hatred.

You might burn with the putrid seeds of it instead.

And you'll wait, biding time for your lover to make the descent into the depths right along with you.

And you'll look at them and know. Neither of you are cowards as you stand in the chasm of your hatred. You might reach for each other. You might claw and fuck and punish one another slowly in some sick offering to the love that burned you both.

You might stay that way forever, stealing bitter pleasure from one another, faking the curl of lips that once grinned without reservation. You might cry and laugh and build something atop those dead dreams of a world in which love would not destroy. But you'll know, you've been wrecked.

You have been obliterated in the flare of love's supernova.

Or you might be a coward.

You might leave your bitter lover.

You might try again, caught perpetually in the wheel of a million minuscule meteor showers of hearts flaring and failing.

But it'll never stick. It'll never stay.

Because even if you manage to ration, to keep burning... love will end.

Death will claim it.

And you should hope, that your love does not last that long, because then it will stay with you as an eternal suffering, torturing with pangs through the chambers of your rotten heart until it finally shutters to a stop.

No. No one ever tells you about the inevitability of falling out of love.

They don't tell you, because even if they knew the truth, they'd still hope to burn.

And I am like them, too

Always hoping

That you'll burn with me.