They tell you fire is an end. A purification. A closure. But that’s a lie spoken by the living, to soothe the unbearable thought that something remains. Fire doesn’t erase. It translates. Fire is not a destroyer, it is an interpreter, a violent linguist, fluent in flesh. Every pore, every scar, every stitch of human contradiction is rewritten in flame, rendered into a language we pretend not to know: ash.

When the body enters the furnace, it does not simply burn. It speaks. Skin contracts, curling inward like regret. Eyes boil from remembering. The tongue, that last traitor, blackens into silence. But the ribs creak, as if the body resists, as if some residue of identity arches up against the inevitability of interpretation. The bones do not surrender easily. They split like syntax breaking under pressure. The heart, that mythic thing, bursts quietly, as if finally understanding it was never more than a hot knot of muscle.

You think you’re watching, safe behind glass. But if you look long enough, you begin to feel the fire inside you. You begin to sense the translation reaching for your own skin, as though proximity alone invites vocabulary into your bones. The smoke rising from the chimney isn’t release. It’s lexical. Each plume carries phonemes of memory, vaporized truth, names that once meant something. You scatter ashes in fields, at sea, under trees but you never ask what the ashes do with you.

Because ash is not inert. Ash is thought without shape. And when it clings to your fingers, to your breath, to the folds of your lungs, you begin to dream things that were never yours. Memories take root in your sleep like black spores. You speak in languages no one taught you. You say names no one remembers. And when you light a match, your body pulses, almost in reverence.

Cremation, you realize, was never about ending. It was a beginning too vast to control. Fire translates the flesh into dust, yes. But dust is not silence. Dust is the book written after the body ends. Dust is the voice that survives the scream. And fire, that divine linguist, doesn’t ask for permission. It reads you as you are imperfect, afraid, unfinished and gives you back in fragments. Somewhere in that smoke, the body still dreams. And someone else is breathing it in.