If this is to end in fire, then we should all burn together. Watch the flames climb high into the night. Where did all this begin, I ask. It’s hard to tell- the beginnings and endings start to blur together after a point. Last night was the end of another beginning, and I suppose another beginning after an end, although it doesn’t feel like one yet. It just feels like the mountain is burning.

When a relationship ends, people always tell you things to try to help you look forward, and forget the pain. They’re largely platitudes, and people mean well, but it doesn’t suffocate the flames. They will burn until the fire smolders and eventually dies out on its own.

But right now all I see is fire. I see everything burning down around me. I see the future of the relationship dying, burning, disappearing into ash. I see what I thought my future was, changing again. Disappearing in front of me as though the cloud of smoke is too thick to see through, and what lies on the other side of it, a mystery.

This will be the worst of it. The day after. The hours following the restless night’s sleep, when every time I awoke into semi-consciousness, my mind remembered that things are different now, and I struggled to quiet my mind and fall back into a fitful sleep, hoping to find comfort in unconsciousness.

This is the part when I question things. I wonder if I could have or should have done things differently. I wonder if I will be missed. I wonder if I added anything to his life, or if it will feel differently without me in it. I wonder if I did the right thing. This is the part where I’m filled with regret. Regret that maybe I wasn’t strong enough or patient enough to make it work. Regret that maybe I just didn’t know how. Regret that we had no closure, and I have to be OK with that. Maybe it will come. Maybe it won’t. For now all I have are the unfeeling words, spoken as though we were strangers: I’m sorry it didn’t work out. And then he was gone. And I’m left to figure out what happens next.

Now I see fire
Inside the mountain
I see fire
Burning the trees
And I see fire
Hollowing souls
I see fire
Blood in the breeze
And I hope that you remember me

-Ed Sheeran