Remember Yourself Before You Die.

Someday she’ll be gone. Her pretty, rotten head turned to bone and dust. She’ll live on in eulogies and the eyes of babies—wide, unblinking, filled with hunger. Pulses of her combustible heart will echo in the man who loved her in roars, in tattoos and wedding bands, in houses built and children born, their little feet dancing in the same halls where he chased her down to make love on rainy Groundhog Day afternoons. She’ll live on in the fire-forged bonds and weathered pride of a shared lifetime.

And in the heart of the one who loved her only in whispers, she is kept like an unholy relic pressed delicately between the final pages of a novel, her rising day glowing faint as ember-ash. Marked as memory in the briefest passage of a shadow-cast chapter. All the things she did to make him ache, laid bare in cryptic prose, so that only the two of them would see it there. The sunken goddess, permanently footnoted in the margins of a mortal tale.

And if this gentle fire starter ever walked you home, you’d remember her passion—how it roared through the door like a summer storm: untameable, urgent, righteous in its timing. You’d remember her tenderness, too—how it felt like a razor held too close to the skin.

But the most precious of them, those most unfortunate inheritors of her raw edges and unvarnished truths, will conjure her in the tremors felt inside their chests: a fiery resurrection of seismic sparks and slack-jawed sentience, forever lit by all her secret sorrows.

They’ll be better than she ever was. Maps and blueprints made it clear: this was the plan all along.

God knows, she wasn’t easy to hold. In a world that rewards numbness, she refused not to feel. She bled to paint the canvas bright. Her vulnerability the thing that made her strong. Let it be known that she loved the world, but not the inequalities and institutions created to keep people in line. Why can’t everyone be allowed to burn in technicolor? Why only the chosen few?

Alas, she was among them. At least for a time.