𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗔𝗥𝗬: “Chosen Burn”By John Paul Reyven S. Anadilla

 

 Published by: Shaina Pajarillo 

Date Published :January 26, 2025

Time Published: 10:04 AM

Category: Prose

Theme: Love’s inescapability—chosen not by will, but by the body’s refusal to survive without it.

I will never outrun the weather nested in your lungs, and I have no hunger for the prize even if it arrived washed and ceremonial. You enter before yourself. Your breath precedes you like a season with a memory of my bones. It warps whatever room tries to contain it—bows the light, sours the corners, leaves my mouth tasting of thaw. Let me stay in that wake. Let me make a life in the torn atmosphere where you have already endured your own exit. I will take what you leave behind—the bruised air, the spillover, the salt residue of a body choosing absence. I will breathe the evidence of you.

I will follow the stretched-out weight of your silhouette until my pulse loses its numbers, until the body forgets its clean borders and responds only to nearness. Name me faithful. Name me ruined. Loop a word around my neck and tug until it slips free. Hold your hand above me like an unfinished sentence, or erase it altogether. I will come without being asked. I will still listen for the voice that carries your exact outline. Reverence and framework. The way the bones were set, the way the ribs learned to open and survive.

Not loving you would fracture something anterior to decision. There was no negotiation, no flirtation with destiny’s theatrics—no winged child drawing a bead. This was masonry. Instructions etched. Edicts folded into the hinge of my mouth, the violence of teeth meeting. To not love you would sterilize the world of its honest colors, drain it until nothing confesses to having been handled. Blues would vanish. Purples would have no cause. Touch would become rumor. It would be treason enacted with my own hands, an immaculate execution staged under full sun, the onlookers praising my discipline. It would be choosing the coffin for its silence, mistaking numbness for intelligence. An error so precise it wears the costume of clarity. So reasonable it could persuade a god to look away.

I learned the true name of your fire and crossed the space it required. I watched the heat. I learned what it consumes. I knew it would leave only ash and the vacancy where desire once learned its shape. I came forward diminished, trembling, illuminated by a knowledge the body was not designed to survive. I counted the loss before it happened. I rehearsed it. I set it down like instructions meant for after. And still I mistook the burn for invitation. I mistook your warmth for a language that would recognize me. I mistook vanishing for closeness, extinction for the small mercy of being held without explanation.

If there is a transgression here, it is not the excess of love. It is the belief that my body could ever be trained to refuse you.