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It wasn’t about him. It was never about him.
In fact, she never meant for him to have any involvment in the matter, never meant for him to ever know about it. He was never meant to know anything.
It had started long before she ever knew him.
It started when her father had brought out a lighter one evening. He opened his pack of cigarettes and took a long drag, his shoulders relaxing. He sunk into the chair. He no longer cared about hiding his addiction from his daughter, playing with a doll idly on the carpeted floor, six years old and quiet as a mouse.
She was known for being a rather emotionless child. Not once had she laughed or grinned or cried. Her mother fretted about her, but her father didn’t mind. No tantrums was fine with him. The lack of feelings wasn’t a problem with him. She watched with glazed eyes as flaky ashes fell to the carpet. She stared at them as they floated gently to the floor, choking and coughing a bit from the fumes.
She stared even longer at the lighter. How could a fire be hiding in the tiny object?
Late into the night, she snuck into the living room where the lighter was still lying next to the ashtray, and stole it. The next morning, she hid it in her backpack and ran off into the woods to play.
It was yellow and shiny and had a grey top that flipped open. She immediately was fascinated, entranced. Her eyes lit up for the first time. It was so small, but had such power! When she mimicked her father’s motions, it let out a fizzling spark once, twice, thrice, and then burst into a tiny flame.
She knew what she was doing tomorrow. Her eyes burned with the fire she now possessed.
Her mother found the neighbor’s cat later that month, half-decomposed and covered in soot, and she had screamed. It was the kind of scream from a horror movie that got half-hearted reviews, one that never really sent shivers down your spine. It never even got under her skin. She didn’t care that she had been found out. The cat was annoying anyways. Her flames were bright, unstoppable, unable to be extinguished, and she would feed the fire until everything came down around her.
Years later, in her twenties, she met him. Her lover. He was sunny and bright and passionate and emotional and everything she wasn’t. He was her fire. She wanted him, in a way that she hadn’t wanted since she’d laid her eyes on that lighter over a decade ago.
And eventually, she got him. It seemed like she had attached herself to him, in a strange way. She wanted him to be hers, and only hers, but shied away from affection and emotion. She didn’t know how to respond to his hugs, how to smile for him. She didn’t know how to be genuine.
And that meant that she had to avoid him, and that meant that she left the house often, coat over her shoulders and lighter in her pocket.
She didn’t know what she wanted more, him or her fire. And that scared her.
She hadn’t known what it was like to be scared before.
She flicked the lighter, and threw it down on the large pile of dry grass and twigs at her feet. The willow tree sheltered the newborn flame, and it slowly climbed higher and higher. As it began to lick the tree top, she backed away to admire the light in the drizzling rain. Her light.
Her eyes gleamed.
Her fire burned.
Her lover still smiled for her when she came home. He smiled through watery eyes, and she wasn’t sure if it was from her late return or from the water drops tapping out a rhythm on the sidewalk or from the ash that clung to her shoulders, even through the rain. She didn’t know how to understand what he felt on their best days together.
He hugged her close and securely whenever she came home, and she responded the same. Her eyes were as dry as the Sahara, saved from the rain by her umbrella, glazed over with disinterest. Waiting for the next opportunity to buy another lighter. To buy more gasoline. To build a stack of sticks and grass. To relish in the newfound brightness.
To burn.
(She never thought about how he had had an umbrella of his own when she came out to greet him, and how his clothes were dry.)
She would set the world on fire just to watch it go ablaze, and she would smile the same smile she always had before. An answering smile. An answer to the questions, to the counselors at school and the dead cat her mother found covered in charcoal and gasoline, to the classmates who were afraid of her in kindergarten, to the prescriptions in her cabinet, ever fluorescent.
To her lover, whose eyes were still full of water on the sunniest day of the year. She still ignored the drip-dropping of water on her neck whenever they hugged.
(It wasn’t raining.)
(She didn’t know how to explain it, so she avoided it.)
(Sometimes, she thinks that he cries because he doesn’t know what to do anymore.)
He cried when she left and cried when she came home, and he cried when he was alone and cried when she was with him. He cried when she smelled like a campfire and when she had ashes sprinkled in her hair, and he cried when their budgeting started to include lighters and gasoline.
He cried every tear that she never could.
Sometimes she wished that she could cry for him instead. He must have been so dehydrated.
(For his birthday, she bought him a nice water bottle. “So you can stay hydrated. You cry an awful lot,” she said. He grinned and hugged her, then pulled away quickly.
“Thank you.” His lips were wobbly and saltwater streamed down his cheeks. She smelled like a campfire.)
She always had grey peppering her clothes. Her smile was subdued, but her eyes were distant and wild. Like they knew something. Like they had already watched the world burn down in their head a million times, and enjoyed every second.
A psychopath.
An arsonist.
Someone who burned trees and papers for fun. Someone who bought too many lighters in too little time. (The gas station attendant had never seen so many lighters be laid out on the checkout counter.) Someone who watched her lover cry and looked away with disinterest. Someone who didn’t leave the house one day to burn.
(He was still home, crying in the corner. She didn’t notice him until the end.)
Someone who never cried when she watched her lover scream and his tears evaporate, ugly crying, with eyes of crimson and half moon bruises underneath and snot running down his face, saltwater on his tongue and dripping off his chin just to go up and evaporate in flames and smoke.
Someone who died with her lover by accident and didn’t care. Someone who watched the flames with gleaming eyes until the end.
(Her eyes were still gleaming when they burned to the ground.)