I Stayed When It Burned

There were two of us at the edge.
Only one of us is still here.

You flaked at the cliff.
I stayed at the fire.

That is the sentence.
It does not require elaboration.

Flaking preserves something. It preserves the version of the self
that has not yet been tested.
It preserves the story: the one you can still tell yourself in the morning,
the one you can survive hearing yourself
say aloud.

Staying does not preserve anything.

Staying is not bravery, and it is not endurance.
It is what happens when the nervous system finally stops calculating exits,
when the field of available escape routes simply ceases to register as a field at all,
and what remains is the body,
the room,
and the slow physiological recognition
that the only way through is through.

The fire does not negotiate. It does not reward presence with relief.
It takes what it takes, and what is left
is whatever the body did not flinch out of.

What I have now
was forged in the heat you would not stand in.

There is no symmetry here.

The cliff and the fire are not two valid choices.
One leaves a body intact and a self unfinished.
The other leaves a self intact and a body that knows things only fire can teach.

You will tell the version you can afford to remember.
I will carry the one that doesn't get said.

I am not asking you to come back.
I am not asking the story to balance.

This is not grievance. This is geometry.

The asymmetry is the ending.

You flaked at the cliff.
I stayed at the fire.

Or... you flaked because the fire would have asked you to stay.
I stayed because the cliff would have asked me to leave.

And what was forged in that staying does not require your version of it to ever match.