The Ashes And The Ember
The room is sterile, the air thick with the scent of disinfectant and something else—something heavier, something that lingers in the quiet between beeping machines and distant voices. The walls are white, too white, as if they’ve been stripped of anything real, anything human. He lies there, body drained, mind a battlefield where echoes of the past and whispers of the future clash like rival storms.
He had walked this road before. The weight of it all, the crushing silence of an existence that felt more like a sentence than a life. He had reached for the exit, not in rage, not in impulse, but in the quiet acceptance of a soul too tired to keep fighting. He was ready. Ready to close his eyes and wake up somewhere else—somewhere without the pain, without the longing, without the never-ending ache of feeling unwanted, unseen, unheld.
But then, a voice. A tether in the void.
Not an angel, not some divine intervention—just a friend. Just someone who refused to let the darkness win without a fight. And so, instead of fading, he found himself here, in this bed, alive but not whole. Breathing, but not sure if he wanted to.
He thinks of love. Not the kind written in fairytales, but the kind that wraps around your bones and makes you believe you are more than the sum of your scars. He has chased it, held it, lost it, broken it. And now, in the absence of it, he feels hollow.
He had loved her. Maybe he still did. Maybe he always would. But love was never enough, was it? Not when the weight of his own mind pressed harder than any arms could hold. Not when every goodbye felt like confirmation of what he had feared all along—that he was too much, or maybe not enough.
His fingers graze the thin sheet beneath him. He is still here. Despite everything, despite the choices made in the silence of an empty room, he is still here.
And that means something.
Maybe not everything, not yet. But something.
Because the fire that nearly consumed him did not finish its work. Because somewhere, buried beneath the ashes of who he was, an ember still glows. Weak, fragile, but there.
And for now, that is enough.
We are all embers, flickering in the dark, tested by the fire, and reshaped by the storms. Some burn out. Some are consumed. But those who endure—those who refuse to let the flames define them—become something greater.
You are not just the ashes of your pain. You are the fire that rises from them. And though the scars remain, they are not marks of failure—they are proof that you have survived. That you are still here. That you are still burning.
