Ashes

                Flames, red hot flames… the silent sizzle of burning paper… the messily wrote letters disappearing as the sheets turned black beyond recognition… These were once my thoughts, the words I couldn’t tell anybody else, my privacy, my secret haven. 

Or so I thought, until someone found out about it.

To be made a laughing stock because of some teenage emotion was the last thing that I wanted myself to be. That’s why the moment they knew about my secret longing for him was the same time I built my resolve to get rid of it. I would have accepted if they were angry or indifferent but they laughed! Laughed! They scoffed at me for being stupid, naïve. I knew that was the reaction I would get from them but to actually hear it made me feel… foolish, as if my logical self just woke up from lalala land to tell the floating part of me that what I wrote there were all trivial matters. I’m older now, I know better than to still feel what I felt before. I believe I’m stronger too.

I continued to watch as the fire consumed my diary. It’s too late to stop it now. In a moment, it would really be gone. I could never read it again. You would have thought I would be crying in regret. But no. My hands were steady as I fed more of its pages to the fire. My eyes were dry.

I considered just simply throwing it away but burning it seemed more significant. Once something has been burned, you can’t turn it back to its original form. It would always just be ashes. I want to take this opportunity to tell myself that the me who wrote all those nonsense should be forgotten, burned and never to return again.

The blaze slowly died out. All that was left were crumbled globs of ashes. It’s too late to turn back now.

I reached out to scoop them to my hands but even my feathery touch made it crumble. The wind blew and disturbed the ashes, causing it to fly but it lingered a second more before disappearing.

As if saying goodbye…