Now You Are Ashes, What Used to Be You.
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For now, let yourself be ashes. It’s alright. It’s over. Everything that could burn, burned.
In some way that you won’t understand for a long time, you invited this; without knowing, you asked plainly for the secrets of becoming new. Hours ago, the fire was raging. You were running through the woods, carrying what you could — a winter jacket, an old stuffed rabbit — and it caught you, snagged your ankle like a dog or a wolf or an angry spirit.
It came out of nowhere, bright copper and elemental, light and indifferent, purer than vows. Fire was the first thing to really understand you, to know what you truly needed. Now it is quiet and still, faint, far away. You died with the trees, the ground, the birds, like friends. Like family.
Now you are ashes. Now you are the thing that used to be you but is also not anything else. You live here now, in this hallway between universes, and the wind blows you around from place to place. It won’t be like this forever, but it may be longer than you thought. Get comfortable. Forget your name, what you most deeply hoped for. All those things burned too; they were beautiful, they are gone.
Now you commune with ghosts, wandering spirits, demons, the things that live between. Nobody will want to get to know you or take you on a date. They will teach you how to hunt, toughen up, survive on nothing but this stark moment.
There is no heart to protect, or even a body. For the first time, you are free. Now you seek nothing, inhabit no want, understand the mystic teachings, formlessness and the emptiness, and you can’t stop crying. There is still the want of wanting to understand something else. Now crying is only the dull crack of branches, smoke, dangerous air.
You are trying to hold memories, but you cannot hold anything, and they are spilling out of you like spiders and seeds, no longer yours, not this one about the red dress with the enormous skirt, the cab back from the Cambridge, the way you buried your face into Christine’s arm, unable to stop laughing, now returning to the earth, rewinding.
The moon witnesses generously, but she does not console. You learn natural laws, comings and goings. When the temperatures drop, the teachers arrive; you are taught best when it is coldest. Desire differently, they say; want differently, they say; and they too won’t acknowledge your sadness.
They gather the ashes, form you into possible futures, before blowing you from the palms of their bright red hands, and you are once again scattered, lesser than broken bones, quieter than shallow breathing. Only exhaling, exhaling, exhaling.
And here is yet another secret: one day, one day when you are not expecting it or hoping for it or planning for it or dying over it — when you’ve accepted that now you are ashes, and you have grown used to the order of the day — something else will arrive, and it is that which has loved you without condition. All of the trees will sigh in relief, and the forest floor will ripple with light.
It will collect you, gather you, its tenderness will break the heart you believed was no longer there. It will hold you, and it will know you, even more deeply than that which burned you away.
And though you do not know what, and surely this can be a brutal mystery, one day you will be something other than ashes.
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Adele Regina Somma (she/her) is a psychotherapist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and holds a BFA in creative writing from Emerson College.
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