Before Emma, I was the kind of man who mistook survival for living.
I worked, I existed, I moved through days like wading through water—everything heavy, slow, colorless. The world felt gray and uninviting, as though it had long ago given up trying to reach me. I kept to myself, kept my head down, spoke little. People at work said I was quiet, "focused," the kind of man who did his job and went home without anyone remembering he'd been there.
They didn't know that I didn't really go home. Not in the way people meant it. I went to a space—a rented room with peeling wallpaper, one chair, one bed, one light that flickered when it rained. I'd sit there in the dark, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, thinking of nothing, feeling even less.
I told myself I didn't need anyone. That caring was a liability. I'd watched too many people leave, too many promises dissolve. Somewhere along the way, I decided it was safer to keep the world at arm's length. If you didn't love anything, nothing could hurt you.
That was the rule I lived by. Until Emma.
The first time I met her, I thought she was chaos personified. She walked into my life like she owned every inch of the air around her—radiant, unpredictable, impossible to ignore. She had this way of looking at people, like she saw not who you were but who you could be, and refused to accept anything less.
She worked at a gallery then, painting on the side, forever covered in colors she couldn't wash off. The first time I saw her, she was arguing with a customer about whether art should be "understood." I remember the way her hands moved, expressive and alive, smudges of crimson and gold on her fingertips.
"You don't have to understand art," she said, her voice fierce and certain. "You have to feel it."
That sentence should've been my warning.
Because Emma didn't just want to be understood. She wanted to be felt. And she wanted to teach others how to feel too—especially the ones like me, who'd forgotten how.
At first, I resisted.
She'd try to pull me into her world—drag me to galleries, midnight walks, late-night diners where she'd sketch strangers on napkins. I'd sit across from her, sipping coffee, pretending to listen while she talked about light, texture, emotion, about how colors spoke louder than words.
Red, she said once, was the color of truth.
I told her I hated it.
She just smiled. "Then you're afraid of being seen."
I didn't know what she meant then. But I do now.
Because Emma didn't just see the parts of me I showed. She saw the places I hid—the quiet guilt, the unspoken grief. She found the corners of me that were cracked and painted light into them, refusing to let them stay dark.
And somehow, without realizing it, I began to change.
She made me laugh, something I hadn't done in years. She made me angry too—frustrated, vulnerable, alive. She pushed against every wall I built, and when I finally let one fall, she didn't run. She just stepped closer.
I started writing again.
Nothing big—just words, fragments, memories that felt less heavy when she was near. She'd read them and smile like I'd given her a secret gift. "You're starting to sound like someone who believes in things," she said once.
"Maybe I'm just remembering how to."
That's what she did to me. She reminded me.
Of the way the world used to feel when I was young and hopeful and unafraid to want things.
Emma believed that love wasn't about possession—it was about becoming.
"You don't own the people you love," she said. "You grow with them. You build each other."
And she built me.
Not with grand gestures or impossible promises, but with small, steady acts that rewired how I saw the world. She'd stop to admire broken glass on the sidewalk because it "caught light in a beautiful way." She'd talk to strangers as if they were old friends. She made life messy and brilliant and utterly unpredictable.
I used to think strength meant control—keeping everything contained, never showing weakness. Emma showed me that strength could be soft. That it could mean letting yourself break.
When she loved, she did it without armor. She taught me to do the same.
And when I finally let her in, truly let her in, it felt like sunlight after years underground.
That's why I can't let her go.
It isn't obsession. It isn't denial.
It's that Emma became the only part of me that ever felt real.
When she died—when I thought she died—the world went flat again. But worse this time, because now I knew what I'd lost. I'd tasted color and light and warmth, and all that remained was ash.
The guilt became my ritual. My proof of love. If I stopped hurting, it felt like betraying her memory. If I moved on, it meant admitting she was gone—and I couldn't.
Because loving Emma wasn't just loving her. It was loving myself through her eyes.
And without her, I didn't know who I was anymore.
Dr. Keene once told me survivors cling to pain because it's the last connection to what they lost. "You think you're protecting her," he said, "but you're only protecting your grief."
He doesn't understand.
Emma isn't a wound I can heal. She's the reason I'm still breathing.
Even now, when I close my eyes, I can hear her laugh—the way it filled a room, warm and reckless. I can still feel her hand on my chest when she said, "You don't need to fix everything. You just need to be here."
But I wasn't there that night. I left.
I told myself I'd be right back, that I'd only be gone a moment.
And in that moment, everything changed.
The fire.
The screams.
The red sky.
That's all I remember.
Or all I let myself remember.
And maybe she's right—maybe the rest of it, the guilt, the visions, the haunting—maybe it's my mind's way of keeping her close.
But if that's true, then what am I without it? Without her?
Just the man I used to be.
Gray. Hollow. Empty.
I can't go back to that. I won't.
So even if she's gone—even if what I see, what I hear, is nothing but memory—I'll keep it. I'll hold her ghost close, because it's all that's left of who we were.
If letting her go means losing myself again…
Then I'd rather burn.