I. Scorched by Regret
I built a life out of the wrong kind of silence.
Words I never said,
hands I never held,
the late-night calls I let ring into nothing.
Time, the thief with soft feet, slipped past me while I Dreamed of bravery.
There were days I watched the sun fall into the sea without lifting my head.
The years blurred like oil on water, a shimmer of maybe next time
that never quite arrived.
I remember the trembling of almost,
how close I came to opening the door,
to saying what mattered,
to staying.
But I let it all die quietly.
I mistook comfort for peace,
routine for mercy,
and now,
My bathroom mirror
seems only to reflect
a forlorn stranger.
Sometimes, I hear them — the versions I buried.
The artist, the lover, the boy who still believed.
They whisper like wind through burnt trees, soft and hollow: You could have been more.
And I —
I drink their silence.
It scalds like truth.
It tastes like rust and longing.
The bitter taste
Its name is Regret.
II. Emberborn
It does not ask permission.
Beneath the noise of the world,
beneath the static of every wasted hour,
there is a rhythm.
A pulse, faint but unyielding.
It does not scream.
It burns.
It is the hunger that speaks in still moments
when no one watches,
when the world forgets you.
It says:
You are not done.
It is the curl of smoke before the blaze,
the held breath before the leap,
the solitary candle in a room of dusk.
Small.
Defiant.
There is a kind of fire
that doesn’t need applause.
It lives in the bones of the stubborn,
in the souls of the strange.
It climbs out of cracked hearts
and walks barefoot through ruin
just to prove
that it can.
It doesn’t ask,
Will I make it?
It asks,
Will I burn long enough to find out?
So let them mock your pace.
Let them say you’re lost.
You know better.
You know this heat
that grows in silence,
that survives rain,
that remembers every promise you ever made
to yourself.
You are the flame no one saw coming.
You are the ember that refused to die.
You are the beat that keeps drumming
in a world too deaf to listen.
So burn.