i put your mother through hell, don't you mind?; noellen

I love you. Don't you mind, don't you mind?

This world is on fire.

There is mist on the horizon that curls up into the clouds like smoke, and when the wind rolls through the tips of the burnt ember grass the waves, that flow out through the meadow like ripples, almost look like flames washed in the red light of sunset. The light is palpable, and his eyes flinch and his dark eyelashes quiver for the effort of seeing. This world is on fire, he thinks.

This world is on fire.
This world is on fire.

They were on fire once, too. He remembers the sunlight on her skin, the way triangles of light would fall across the contours of her body and warm the flesh – how she could become a patchwork of hot and cold and how it all felt like nothing on his lips, but oh, the metaphors that he could pull from those memories now (so sharp they would cut him open).

But it’s better this way.

It’s better this way, he tells himself. It’s better to be lost in this nothing life thinking of fire and counting ghosts like he could count the burnt-ember stalks of grass in the meadow he wades through. It’s better to be lost, to think of fire, to count the notches and names of those he left behind until he runs out of earth left to count them with.

It’s better this way, alone and with nothing, than to risk another soul to the pyre.
Another moth to the flame.

“This world is on fire,” he says, aloud, with sunlight throwing triangles of light against his back through the freckled veil of cloud covering overhead.

This world is on fire.
They were on fire once, too.

barret ---