Alchemy

On what survives the fire and what it costs to become

I wrote this a while ago, but lately I’ve found myself returning to it.

We speak about healing in beautiful language. Growth. Transformation. Becoming.

Less often do we speak about the heat of it. The waiting. The long stretch of surviving before anything begins to shine.

Reading this again, I think this piece was my attempt to stay closer to that part of the truth.

Alchemy

They tell you pain makes you stronger.
They never tell you it makes you stranger,
how your skin learns to glitter where it tore.
How the body remembers the fire
long after the flames are gone.

I have burned.
I have blistered.
I have walked barefoot through my own history
and called it healing.

They say gold is purified by fire.
They forget to mention
how it screams while it melts.
How the slag rises first,
all the filth, all the shame,
before anything shines.

They say diamonds are made by pressure.
They don’t say
how long the darkness lasts.
How much earth must crush you
before the light catches your edge.

And pearls,
they start as wounds.
A sharp thing lodged deep
in something soft that couldn’t spit it out.
Layer by layer, the body learns
to coat its pain in beauty.
And people call it precious.

Obsidian knows the truth of this.
Born when everything breaks,
when the mountain itself erupts,
when molten grief cools too fast to crystallise.
It cuts and it gleams,
black glass born of disaster.

And amethyst,
the colour of bruised skin,
formed when iron meets fire and endures.
They say it calms, brings clarity,
but I see only the memory of heat
trapped in violet stone.

I have seen others in the fire,
hands shaking, eyes bright as ore,
and I have stood beside them,
ash on my own face,
saying:
keep breathing.
The burning won’t last forever.
The pressure will pass.
The wound will shine, someday.

But between the fire and the jewel,
between the pain and the polish,
there is the long silence of surviving.
There is the waiting.
The not knowing if you’ll make it.
The truth that not all things beautiful
make it out of the fire whole.

Still,
here I am.
Still glittering in places.
Still smoking in others.
And when I look down,
I see the gold, the diamond, the pearl,
the obsidian, the amethyst.
Not trophies,
but traces of what I’ve carried through.
They are quiet now,
warm against my skin.
And I know, at last,
I am rich.