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Between Frost and Forgetting, Her Spirit Glows: Love’s Last Light, Eternal and Unnamed
“My love is a haunted house, a ghost possessing her own body, a fire that burns itself alive. A light almost too bright to look at, but I forced myself to look as long as I could.”
— Rose Szabo
Google’s Deep Dive Podcast: The Eternal Ember, When Love Outlives the Body
Ember Under Glass
A Reading:
By the time November found me, my hands had gone numb.
The frost doesn’t knock here. It just slips in under the door, thin and sly… curling up your legs like a cat that never loved you.
I’d stopped trying to keep the fire alive.
The woodpile was down to a few crooked logs, the kind that hiss before they give up. Even the flames seemed tired of burning.
But on the table by the window… there’s a jar. A small glass jar, fogged at the edges, faintly glowing.
Inside, a flame. The one I stole last November.
I found it on the bluff above the river, when the air was still soft and alive. The night he and I camped there, before everything went pale. I remember cupping that spark between my hands, whispering to it. It flared up, as if it recognized my breath.
Now, in this blue morning light, it still trembles in its glass cage. Defiant. Tired, but still here.
I called it him.
Because once, there was a him.
He smelled of cedar smoke and storm air, laughed like he was born of thunder.
He traced my jaw one night, said — “You burn too easily.”
And I laughed. God, I laughed. The world laughed.
And then the frost came.
It took him first, last November.
The river froze solid that week, sealed our reflections beneath the ice.
I never went back to the bluff. I don’t want to see what happened. So, I just carried what was left of him, a coal cupped in my palm, an ember. My ember.
Some nights I talk to him. I sit here, by the window, hands hovering over the jar. Whispering stories to the flicker that still listens.
Sometimes it dims. It almost disappears. But then it glows again, like it remembers his breath, his warmth, his laugh splitting the dark like his ax to firewood, to me.
Last night, the wind was screaming.
The moon had lost her way behind the clouds.
I couldn’t bear it anymore
the cold, the silence, the waiting.
So I opened the jar.
The flame didn’t rush out or die.
It rose. Tall. Thin. Trembling. And then it brushed my face.
It felt like a kiss I’d been waiting for all year.
Wild. Fleeting. Unbearably tender.
When morning came, the frost still rimmed the windows, but the light had changed.
The air shimmered gold.
My hands were warm again.
The last of the logs caught fire. On their own, somehow. And they burned bright.
Outside, the snow began to fall, not cruelly this time…
but softly.
Like it had remembered mercy.
Sometimes… the warmth that survives the frost isn’t in the fire at all.
It’s in the remembering.
That which freezes… a wraith in her glacial dark.
Her Afterglow
Verse I
By November’s hand my fingers lost their will.
The rocks returned, familiar as we go
The fire, like tide, and breaking over him,
and trained to my jaw as if it were a flame.
“You burn too easily,” he said, and smiled.
And I did burn, and burned because of…
him.
Verse II
The frost took him before it came for me.
The river sealed his name beneath the ice,
and I could not return to where we stood.
The bluff above the water, gold with dusk
that place became the ache I could not touch.
I carried him instead, a coal cupped close,
too small for warmth, too dear to ever drop.
Chorus
O, ember under glass, you stubborn spark,
still trembling like the heart that will not rest.
Your glow remembers everything he was
his breath, his hands, the weight of every word.
You are his beauty, soft and unfinished,
the mercy left behind when all else froze.
You are the song that silence cannot keep.
Verse III
I talk to you when night becomes too loud.
I tell you how the wind still finds the cracks,
how memory burns slower than the fire,
how sometimes, for a moment, you grow dim,
as if you dream of leaving me behind.
Then flare again, as if recalling breath.
Verse IV
The cabin moans when snow leans on the roof.
The world is pale, it’s easier that way.
The cold has manners now, it doesn’t bite,
it only watches, patient as a god.
And still, beneath its gaze, you move and live,
as though his warmth is waiting in your glow.
Chorus
O, ember under glass, you stubborn spark,
still trembling like the heart that will not rest.
Your glow remembers everything he was
his breath, his hands, the weight of every word.
You are his beauty, soft and unfinished,
the mercy left behind when all else froze.
You are the song that silence cannot keep.
Instrumental Break
Chorus
O, ember under glass, you stubborn spark,
still trembling like the heart that will not rest.
Your glow remembers everything he was
his breath, his hands, the weight of every word.
You are his beauty, soft and unfinished,
the mercy left behind when all else froze.
You are the song that silence cannot keep.
Chorus
O, ember under glass, you stubborn spark,
still trembling like the heart that will not rest.
Your glow remembers everything he was
his breath, his hands, the weight of every word.
You are his beauty, soft and unfinished,
the mercy left behind when all else froze.
You are the song that silence cannot keep.
Outro
Now I lie down within the pinewood earth.
The soil knows the truth the living don’t.
My hands are folded where the warmth once was.
The glass still hums beneath the weight of snow.
He lives in that small glow that will not fade
the ember under glass, the last of…
me.