Slow Burn- Meghan Jacoby

Like fireworks, the intensity strikes me with a sizzle and a flare as my eyes track your movements as you make your way through the crowd. Dancing lightly, your footsteps are sweet, and dainty, and I feel burdened with thoughts of what will happen next, or what has happened. The what-if’s surround me like a heavy drumbeat, and your gaze pierces the music. We rest.
We are closer now, perhaps, than we have ever been before, smoldering across crowded room. The noise rises above us, smoky with the pressure of a thousand heartbeats. Daring, I move through the crowd, stopping and pausing, constantly checking where you are, finding your eyes meeting mine. We are both intrigued by the boldness, by the harshness the fire burns with. It is almost too bright, here in this dark basement. The wood beneath feels as if it is coals, fire leaping from my feet, marking the floor with black streaks. I am far from ashamed of the trail behind me, far from afraid of what people may see or say. Let them take it in, words silenced by the heat, a moth drawn to a flame.
Perhaps you are the flame though, and I am the moth, for I am drawn over and over again to you. Yet, you do not extinguish my life, but breathe into it, oxygen to my own fueling fire, stoking the flames with a tender touch. It is passionate, and lively, but it is tender and small, and when I lose sight of you, I am brought back by the smallest brush of your hand against my own. I spin, dizzily, falling. And then you catch me.
So the flames are ravaging, swallowing up everything around this new creation, melding and molding us, silver and gold, bronze and iron, branding us in the heat. We are twisted, turned, sculpted and we are no longer one and one, and we are no longer two people, but we have become something that is not quite one, and not quite two, and not quite nothing, but a little bit of everything, undefined. Statues in the moment, trinkets for a past, and work in a gallery for the future. The blue white heat laps at our bodies and begs for more to feed it. There is only an exhalation of breath, a small smile, a reassuring grip, and a remembrance.
It is too easy to forget what it is that destroys us nowadays.