As the last days of winter fade into spring, it feels a little warmer than usual, but so does every spring. Your favorite sweater, that kept you cozy through months of freezing cold, feels just the slightest bit too warm for the weather. The cool spring rain washing down your skin doesn't leave you shivering and desperate for a warm cup of tea in front of a fire. In some ways it's pleasant, but you can't shake the nagging feeling that something isn't right. The blissful warmth of early spring juxtaposed against the bitter chill of late winter always feels unseasonably warm, but this heat feels somehow different, like it's coming from within, rather than without. For the entirety of spring, you try to deny it, rationalizing it away as just your imagination.
The playful warmth of the last days of late spring blends into the oppressive heat of summer, and the warmth within you grows too. Some days, it feels pleasant, like the familiar embrace of a loved one after a long time apart or the cozy feeling of a warm blanket on a cold day. Other days, it reminds you more of a fever, slowly burning you up from within. You've consulted a doctor, but they dismissed it as nothing more than the complaints of a child, and sent you home with a lighter wallet and a nagging voice in your head telling you that you're simply imagining it all. Every time you sit baking in the heat, the voice pipes up, telling you that it's just the weather, or that you need to grow up and learn to handle the heat.
By the end of the summer, it has started to become truly uncomfortable. Even the night air can't fully cool you down, and the days are nearly unbearable. Even in the shade, you can't stop yourself from sweating, and you're hyper-aware of the rivulets of saline running down your back. Sometimes, when your heart starts beating harder, you can feel the warmth getting pushed out with every beat; waves of heat radiating out from your core. The voice in your head has only gotten more persistent with each passing day. Sometimes, while you're swimming in the lake to cool down or wandering the city streets drenched in sweat, it compares you to everyone around you that isn't complaining about the heat, and is handling it without issue.
As summer gives way to autumn and the days begin to become shorter and cooler, the heat within you continues to build. The voice in your head tells you that you imagined it, but on a particularly cool and foggy morning, you swear you can see steam rising from your exposed skin. You believe the voice less with each passing week, but it only continues to get louder and more persistent. Alongside the voice in your head, the heat within you has gone from feeling like a warm embrace just a few short months ago to feeling more like a burning ember lodged deep in your chest, that you can't dislodge no matter how hard you try. And you've tried. One particular night, driven halfway mad by the heat building within you and the voice in your head, you snap and try clawing it out. Perhaps it was a vain hope that you'd actually find an ember hiding just beneath the skin, and you could cut it out and be free. Perhaps you thought you'd get some temporary relief from the heat by venting it out of your body like steam from a burst pipe. You didn't succeed in either, but you did succeed in shutting the voice in your head up for a little bit.
Months more pass as the heat grows ever-greater, and the voice grows ever-louder. With increasing frequency, you shut the voice up with the cold steel of your knife, but it has started to have less and less effect. Snow has blanketed the ground, and you sometimes find yourself spending hours laying in the snow craving relief. You've mostly accepted that this heat is real, and that it's within you, but everyone around you seems blind to it. Some days, you walk down the street, and are surprised that brushing shoulders with a passing stranger doesn't set their jacket aflame. The voice in your head is practically screaming now, mixing its previous refrains with blame for this heat that you suffer through, calling it a punishment handed down to you from on high.
One night, you finally snap. The voice in your head drowns out your thoughts, and heat feels like a red-hot poker thrust through your chest. With no regard for the blizzard raging outside, you run outside in a frenzy. You can't escape the heat, you can't escape the voice, but you can try. You sprint through the empty streets, clad in almost nothing despite the cold and with bare feet slipping on the cobbles, while the voice hurls abuse. It calls you selfish for disappearing into the night without a warning, but you run on. It laughs at you for trying to run from your problems as the streetlamps become fewer and further between. It calls you selfish for abandoning everything to try to escape. It calls you weak as your legs begin to feel heavier, but you keep pushing yourself onwards. It calls you a failure as the paved roads give way to unpaved paths. You trip on a loose rock, managing to catch yourself before your face hits the ground. As you push yourself back to your feet, you see flames covering your exposed skin, licking their way across your body. With renewed vigor, you start running again, leaving a trail of ashes in your wake. You fall a second, a third, a fourth time, but each time you get back up and continue running, the voice in your head drowning out every thought. Finally, your legs give out, and you collapse face-first into a snow bank. Just before the world goes dark, the heat seems to reach a blistering crescendo.
You wake just as the sun is rising on a cool spring morning. The clouds in the sky are stained red by the sunrise, reminding you of something you can't quite place. A memory floats up of a body covered in flames, but it feels distant, like it belongs to someone else. Still, you look down to check for burns, but see none. You run a finger across your skin, and you're surprised how soft it feels. You stand up, and as the breeze hits you, you shiver.
This story is something I wrote while sleep-deprived for a creative writing class, and I re-wrote it while also sleep-deprived, so apologies for the grammar. When I was deciding what to write about, the idea of a metaphorical rebirth was on my mind, and a phoenix-like transformation ended up being the best thing I could come up with to describe that. I tried to leave it vague what the transformation in this story was to or from exactly, in part because I wasn’t exactly sure when writing the story. One thing I was sure of, though, was that I wanted the story to be in second person. I didn’t want to introduce a character just to have them undergo a transformation in the course of about a thousand words, and the only thing I wanted less than that was to make the story appear to be about myself. Even if the story was stained by my emotional state when writing it, I wanted to keep some plausible deniability.