"KILN."
I did not rise softly.
There was no gentle rebirth,
no quiet spiritual smoke
lifting politely into the sky.
What was left of me
had been incinerated.
Not metaphor—
a full-body ruin.
My former self collapsed first.
Framework snapping in the heat
like dry branches in a furnace.
Identity blistered,
layers of it sloughing away
in blackened sheets.
Everything tender
liquefied.
Trust ran molten
through the cracks of the floor.
Hope warped in the heat
like metal left too long
in the forge.
And the smell—
God, the smell.
A life reduced
to a bitter dust.
Memories shriveled
into brittle husks
that crumbled
when touched.
Nothing graceful remained.
Just a pit
of grey fragments
and the silence
after destruction.
But in the debris
something stubborn stirred.
Not light.
Not redemption.
Something primitive
with soot in its lungs
and fire still living
in its marrow.
It began collecting
what hadn’t completely turned to powder.
The splintered pieces.
The scorched remains.
The sharp little relics
of every betrayal.
I pressed them together
like shattered pottery.
My fury—
the glue.
My grief—
the kiln.
I fired a new skeleton
in that brutal heat.
Forged a spine
tempered harder
than the one that burned.
Where my heart once softened,
there is now
a chambered engine
pounding steady
like iron struck
again
and again
on an anvil.
So when people ask
how I became this—
this unyielding thing
with smoke still trapped
behind the ribs—
I tell them the truth:
The woman you destroyed
was turned to cinder.
And from the wreckage -
I forged something
that the flames -
could no longer claim. 🖤
written by: SVW March2026 xx