Pyromania

There is that moment before you strike the lighter. That brief, breathless instant in which everything inside you collapses to a single point: the flame. Then the heat, the crackling, the light. And inside you, for the first time in a long while, a stirring that feels real. No performance, no functioning, no evasion — but something burning, alive, finally eating its way through the numbness.

And at the same time the force of the guilt that follows. The knowledge that something irreversible has happened. Maybe no one was in danger. Maybe they were. Maybe you swore to yourself it would never happen again, and then the pressure returned — that pressure that builds like a second body inside your body, and knows only one exit.