What the Fire Left

I lost the thing that made me a name,
watched it walk out wearing my own skin.
The house still stands, but forgets my shape.
Even the mirror hesitates when I come in.

They say time heals.
Maybe it does.

Just not in the places
where I am still bleeding.

Still, I get up.
Still, I set the table
for the ghost of who I used to need.

Grief is love with nowhere to send its mail.
I keep writing the address anyway.

Some nights I am a building mid-collapse,
still arguing with gravity,
still deciding, floor by floor,
that I would rather stand as rubble
than surrender to the fall.

You want to know how I survive?

I don't.
Not the way you imagine.

That woman died
with everything I lost.

But something got up wearing my clothes,
made coffee,
answered when they called my name,
and did not correct them.

Maybe that is what remains.

Not the person I was.
Not the person I expected to become.

Something altered by the fire,
still warm beneath the ash,
still learning the shape of its own hands.

I used to think survival meant
finding my way back to who I was.

Now I know better.

Some fires do not return you to yourself.

They leave you
with a stranger wearing your face,
and the difficult task
of learning to love what remains.

So I keep walking.

Not because nothing was lost.

Because something was.

And because, somehow,
so was I.

But not completely.

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