Possession

Written for Violet’s Literary Quote Challenge
where she asks us to include the following line
into our writing: “A fire can’t burn forever.
Eventually, it consumes itself” from “My
Sister’s Keeper” by Jodi Picoult. Here’s my take.

I knew what she was the moment I saw her. My mind catalogued the danger clearly, dispassionately, like a coroner noting cause of death. And still I walked toward her.

That’s the cruelest part …. I was never blind to it. I saw the whole blueprint of my own ruin. I could trace every step of the descent with perfect clarity, the way a man falling from a great height can count the floors as they blur past.

She didn’t ask for any of it. She existed, and that was enough. The way she turned a glass in her fingers. The particular angle of her jaw when she laughed at something someone said. I built an entire religion from details she wasn’t even aware of.

I stopped sleeping in a way that resembled fatigue. I stopped eating in a way that resembled hunger. Everything became peripheral …. work, friendships, the ordinary business of being alive …. all of it dimming to background noise while she filled every frequency of my attention.

It demolished me the way fire devours: without malice, without mercy, simply because that is its nature.

I told myself, in my weaker moments, that there was comfort in that truth. A fire can’t burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself. But the nights were long, and the fire was patient, and I was running out of things left to offer it.

I understood that what I felt was not love. Love wishes the other person well. This was something older and far less generous. This was possession wearing love’s face.

And I walked into it with my eyes wide open.

That was the worst of it. I always did.

NAR©2026

This is “Ring Of Fire” by Social Destruction

The Flame

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, except where otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.}