Fire Beneath the Floorboards

Recently, someone said to me, “I don’t think I have ever seen you angry.”

The words stayed with me.

I tried to remember the last time rage had taken the whole house, the last night it moved from room to room wearing my name.

But memory gave me no smoke.

So I went looking for the last fire.

Not irritation, not the small blue flame beneath a sentence, not the distant burning of the world that reddens the evening but never reaches the door. I meant the fire that used to know the rooms by heart. The fire that could find every curtain in the dark. The fire that wore my face and made a furnace of the mouth.

There must have been a final time.

A last night when I mistook ruin for relief. A last match held briefly between my fingers. A last moment when the heat rose so quickly I could no longer tell whether I was defending the house or trying to disappear inside it.

But memory offered nothing.

No blackened date. No final room still warm enough to enter.

Only years passing quietly through the place where rage once lived.

This should comfort me.

It does.

Mostly.

I remember the exhaustion more clearly than the power now. The silence after, when even the walls seemed ashamed of having heard me. The terrible morning light finding everything I had said and laying it out where I could not pretend it had vanished with the smoke.

But fire is difficult to remember honestly.

From a distance, even destruction has a glow.

There was something in it I have never found anywhere else: the feeling of becoming larger than whatever had hurt me. Not safer. Not healed. Only larger. For one incandescent moment, pain had to stand inside me instead of the other way around.

Sometimes I miss that magnitude.

Not what it did.

What it felt capable of doing.

I wonder whether that is shameful, or only true.

I wonder where such force goes when it is no longer permitted to burn.

Perhaps it entered my hands.

Perhaps that is why they are always building something now.

Why I strip ruined rooms back to their bones and begin again. Why I press seeds into the dark as though placing small promises where no one can reach them. Why I prune without apology, cutting the dead wood cleanly so the living branch does not have to carry it another year.

The garden has taught me that creation is not gentle.

Roots split stone. Seeds tear themselves open. A shovel enters the earth by force, and still the earth receives it.

Maybe I did not lose the fire.

Maybe it simply changed its appetite.

Once, it wanted everything reduced to evidence.

Now it asks for lumber, soil, time.

Once, it made emptiness.

Now it makes room.

I still wonder what would happen if I called it by its old name.

Whether something beneath the ribs would rise, startled and loyal.

Whether I could hold that heat now without feeding it the house.

Whether fire can ever be touched without choosing what must be lost.

I do not know.

The life around me has become too living to test the question.

There are walls I repaired with my own hands. Green things sleeping beneath the soil. Rooms that trust me enough to remain quiet.

So I leave the match where I cannot find it.

And some nights, standing in the house that survived me, I feel warmth moving through the floorboards, not the hunger of flame, but something slower, deeper, almost tender.

As though the fire is still here.

As though it finally learned how to keep something alive.