Matches

He was the arsonist.
It began as the flicker of a flame in the centre of an eye,
gazing upon me and lighting me ablaze with thoughts I dared not think,
I dare not say.
But when the butterflies turned to bats, I knew they would never leave.

Words spilled from me as though a glass of milk
filled to the brim in the hand of an overly excited child.
Words that fed the flickering fire like gasoline-soaked kindling.
And when the words did not extinguish,
I chose to forget the warnings my parents gave about what happens when you get too close to the flames.

So in retaliation against the ever so familiar cold, I flung myself into the raging arms of heat.
I indulged in the warmth and fell hard and fast through the cracks of the tarnished logs.
Disappearing with the promise of reignition,
the trees of doubt splintered, burnt and demolished in my brain.
I left a trail of ash and coal in my wake.
My dreams corrupted, my life consumed by my own charred hand.

Guilts cruel jagged teeth sunken into my thigh as I watched the oblivious.
He belonged to another and by my own choice I came second.
In my eyes he could do no wrong,
I was ignorant to the ruin he trailed behind him,
sun-stroked dogs dragging themselves along at his ankles.

He held a thumbling bucket of cruelty he promptly drowned my flames with.
The idea that I would never again be alight caused cold damp regret to seep into my socks.
Little did I know that this was only the tip of the iceberg,
And when that iceberg over turned I saw the reality.

I saw her.
She wept rivers around the bench she was perched upon.
And I feared the arsonist was on trial for his crime, little did I know that I was not the accessory.

I approached her, heart in throat, throat in hand.
When she spoke she opened my eyes and…
and I saw the matchbox he kept in his back pocket.
The matchbox filled with the match sticks he had not yet struck and in that moment it was clear.
I wasn’t the burning forest I thought I was,
I was just one of his burnt out matches.
Struck and used to light a small fire for his own amusement,
then deemed useless and flung to the floor by careless hands.

Surrounded by others that fell to the same fate.
Before this illumination I was fractured,
but it broke me to know that he burnt us all down,
left us as nothing more than cinders
only to keep himself, warm.
He was the arsonist.