"KILN."

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