fire emergency from a matchbox

I haven’t cried for months now, but last night, while sitting on my desk, trying not to think about it, about my having experienced it, it dragged me to the basement, tied me to the chair, doused the room with gasoline and lit a match. How can I forgive myself. How can I live tomorrow. Is this aggrandizement, an act of inflating my hurting into some sort of requiem? Trauma is a lot more common, I remind myself. Anyone may leave it as it is. Yet I feel like it is the real thing, the only real thing. We’re only given as much as the heart can endure but pain is much more painful than we expect. When it comes by, everything you’ve built around it, worked against it even in front of it, tends to seem futile. If I could only drench this poem under the ocean. If I could just cast the storm inside my room. Throw all the self-help books and bible verses in the bathtub. I have no time for it. I am asking for a thing that does not feel like fire.