Burn Marks

How we know when a love isn’t just another flame - why I can't go back to who I was before

“The Lilley” by Leonor Fini - (unr.edu)

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We were supposed to be having dinner, but I never quite made it to my own chair. I was perched on his lap, our table strewn with half-forgotten oysters and champagne we had barely touched, the candlelight flickering like it knew too much. His hand rested innocently on my thigh… until it didn’t. It moved like it owned the map of my skin, fingers slipping beneath the hem of my dress with the confidence of a man who knew he could make me forget my name. I smiled sweetly at the waiter, legs crossed tightly over his mischief, playing that delicious game of composure while his fingers teased just enough to turn my pulse into jazz. Everyone else was having dinner. We were feasting.

He whispered something obscene and poetic in my ear, only he could manage both at once, and I laughed, too loudly, but didn’t care. I loved how we turned a three-star restaurant into a private theatre of lust and audacity. My lipstick was smudged, his shirt was untucked, and neither of us gave a damn. We were wrapped in the kind of heat that makes dessert obsolete, and conversation irrelevant. Every touch was a sentence, every glance a paragraph. I think we made love without ever leaving the table. Or maybe we just rewrote the rules of how two people can burn while dressed to kill and pretending to dine…

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What no one tells you is that the heat, the real kind, the ungovernable, cellular kind, is polite when it arrives. It doesn’t announce itself like a cliché; it doesn’t throw furniture or declare war. It’s smooth, seductive, and almost respectful. It lets you continue the conversation, nod along to the specials, make eye contact with the waiter, all while it coils itself around your spine and waits. The real arson begins hours later, sometimes days, when your body cools and your mind dares to retrace its steps. You think you have walked away intact, a little flushed perhaps, until you catch yourself reordering that moment again and again like a favourite scene from a film you pretend not to love. The scorch isn’t in the act; it’s in the residue, in the memory that decides to linger past its welcome and sets up residence in the marrow. Most lust is ephemeral, transactional – a meal deal in a nice box. But some encounters brand. They rearrange your sense of proximity and distort your moral compass just enough to make you question whether north was ever trustworthy in the first place.

Not every blaze deserves a narrative. Most passions, though I’m being generous here, are pleasantly warm, like reheated soup or nostalgia sex, which you consume mostly because you are bored, or tired, or because the other person made an effort. They leave you with flushed cheeks and a vague sense of gratitude that something still functions. But then there are the wildfires. The ones that don’t simply change the temperature, but terraform the entire landscape. They don’t ask you to feel, they require you to evolve. And no, they don’t come labelled. They show up disguised as recklessness, bad timing, marital inconvenience, geographical idiocy. You only know you have been altered when the world, upon your reentry, looks slightly off, when friends ask what’s wrong and you don’t know how to say, “I’ve just remembered a version of myself I didn’t know I missed”.

And etiquette, the tired governess of polite society, always dies first. It’s fragile, overqualified for the job, and allergic to real intimacy. The moment someone’s hand slips beneath your dress in a room full of murmuring couples and vintage Bordeaux, centuries of cultivated civility evaporate with a single breath. You are no longer dining; you are trespassing in your own life, breaking and entering your former identity. And it is both terrifying and relieving to know that you are capable of such casual sabotage. It feels oddly affirming, as if to say: You’re still alive, and here’s the proof, you are misbehaving. Miss Manners rolls over in her grave and sighs, “Finally!”

“Guardian of the Sources” (1980) by Leonor Fini - (one.bid)

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This is where contemporary culture utterly fails us. The apps promise alignment, compatibility, attachment styles that harmonise like IKEA shelving units. Your therapist encourages boundaries, your friends cheer for self-care Sundays and green flags, and the wellness industrial complex offers no end of beige advice about “healing before loving”. And yes, sure, boundaries are important, I don’t want to be stalked, either. But try meditating when someone is whispering obscenities in your ear at a table that costs more than some people’s electricity bill, and you’ll understand how quickly mindfulness collapses under the weight of undisciplined want. We are not wired for serenity. We are wired for disruption, and whoever told us otherwise was selling supplements.

Which brings us, reluctantly, to the myth of The One. A cultural relic dressed up as romantic destiny. We are told The One completes us, calms us, provides companionship and joint tax benefits. A myth built on the capitalist logic of acquisition and certainty. Find the right person, and life becomes a solvable equation. Except some Ones don’t solve anything; they detonate it all and call the explosion enlightenment. They arrive not to walk beside you, but to burn the bridge behind you so you stop looking back. And no, it’s not always noble. Sometimes it’s humiliating. Sometimes The One is not the person you marry, but the one you meet and ruin everything not to forget.

Neuroscience, of course, ruins the mood entirely. It tells you that your surge of longing, your transcendent connection, your giddy sense of spiritual déjà vu is just a soup of cortisol and oxytocin, a hormonal prank orchestrated by your lizard brain. But I don’t care what the brain scans say. When he looked at me like that, like he had seen the ruins of every woman before me and still wanted to walk barefoot through mine, I didn’t feel hijacked. I felt ancient. Like the whole species was momentarily rooting for us.

And maybe, though I hate admitting this, some loves aren’t meant to be understood at all. They arrive not as problems to be solved but as ancient recognitions, half-recalled songs that summon something visceral from beneath the polite debris of adulthood. Plato called it anamnesis – love as a remembering, a soul waking up to what it once knew but forgot in the chaos of incarnation. Jung, less lyrical but no less mystical, called it synchronicity: the eerie precision of two internal worlds crashing into each other at just the right existential speed to rupture the illusion of randomness.

I have spent years cultivating intellectual restraint, building frameworks, rational agreements, narratives with arc and scaffolding… but this? This felt like being hijacked by a force that didn’t ask for interpretation, only participation. And isn’t that the real blasphemy of it? That some forms of love refuse to be domesticated by language or made legible through therapy? We keep trying to assess love the way we assess real estate – location, stability, long-term gain – when perhaps the loves that change us most are the ones that won’t appraise. What if the very metrics we use to define maturity (clarity, caution, consistency) are the same ones that keep us safe from, and starved of the things we secretly crave? Maybe not all truths are meant to be integrated. Some are meant to be survived.

Look how relentlessly our century tries to pasteurise that wildness. We curate date-night selfies, run our flirtations through grayscale filters of “emotional intelligence”, call it growth when what we mostly mean is predictability. Anaïs Nin once wrote that she tasted life “twice, once in the moment and once in retrospection”, but the algorithm now urges us to taste it thrice: live, post, optimise. Pasolini’s Rome was obscene in its candor; Wong Kar-wai’s lovers in In the Mood for Love dined politely while their silence screamed, all reminders that the most subversive eros often slips between the seams of what appears impeccably controlled. We are, in public, forever pretending to dine: crossing legs just so, modulating laughter, demonstrating that we are reasonable creatures who chew with closed mouths. Privately, however, the appetite snarls. The truest encounters happen when the performance glitches, when lipstick ends up on a collar not as branding but as accident, when someone says the unsayable in a voice hushed enough to pass beneath surveillance but loud enough to detonate the heart’s levees. That is the politics of desire: the insurgency of bodies against the PR campaign of polite society, the refusal to let hunger be managed by portion control, the audacity to admit, mid–four-course prix fixe, that we are starving for something no menu, no app, no expertly lit photograph can serve.

“La Mise en Grade” et “Le Secret” (1982) by Leonor Fini - (leonor-fini.com)

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Last week, I told the wild story of the encounter that changed my life – well, a version of it – to a friend I trust precisely because she is allergic to my romantic delusions. We were walking along the Seine, drinking overpriced herbal tea from paper cups that claimed to be compostable and, in the hands of someone more rested, probably were. She listened with that tight-lipped skepticism I’ve come to recognise as concern pretending to be restraint. “It sounds dangerous”, she finally said, “reckless, maybe even a little self-destructive, like you’re trying to set your own life on fire just to prove you’re not numb”. I almost thanked her. Instead, I laughed, too sharply, too loud for the morning joggers, and accidentally dropped my cup, the chamomile soaking into the gravel like a minor offering to a god I no longer believe in.

And then, as if summoned by some ancient reflex, I said the thing I hadn’t realised I believed until it left my mouth: “Dangerous doesn’t mean wrong. Sometimes it just means finally”. And I meant it, not as defiance, exactly, but as admission. A confession that maybe what scares us isn’t the risk of being undone, but the prospect that something in us is still wildly, inconveniently alive, and unwilling to behave. She said nothing after that, just squeezed my arm in that reluctant way she does when she wants to scold me with grace. And I walked home trembling a little, not with regret, but with the quiet terror of someone who knows she just told the truth.

The world will send in the well-meaning medics: articles on trauma bonding, unsolicited recommendations for somatic therapy, side-eye about how his last girlfriend is now in Bali writing a memoir. But here’s the part no one dares say: some of the most drastic, disobedient forms of love look indistinguishable from collapse until you realise that collapse is the prerequisite for metamorphosis.

Not all breakdowns are failures.

Some are architectural.

Real fire, what Rumi would call divine longing and your HR rep would promptly flag as a code violation, demands more than participation; it demands tribute. It does not negotiate. It extracts. It wants your composure, your five-year plan, your ability to make sensible small talk in office kitchens. It will take your time and devour it without apology. It will strip you of your illusions about control, compatibility, self-sufficiency, and yes, it will come for your dignity too, that delicate scaffolding of poise you spent years erecting just to survive dinner parties and family Christmases. But what it gives in return, if you survive the reckoning, is a kind of feral clarity. Not peace (peace is for monks and marketers) but precision. The sensation that your internal compass, buried under decades of conditioning and compromise, has finally remembered which way is wild north.

I’ve walked out of other encounters before. Shaky-kneed, mascara half-melted, breath still tethered to a name I wouldn’t say aloud. Lipstick smudged not like a mistake but like a declaration, war paint for battles waged in hotel corridors and borrowed apartments. I’ve stumbled away from moments that left me drunk on questions I couldn’t phrase, my head echoing with theological static, like someone had unplugged me from the gods mid-prayer. But this time, this particular encounter, feels like something else entirely. Not just another divine interruption, not another exquisite detour from the life I have been allegedly building for decades. This one didn’t just burn, it branded. Left a mark, like a tattoo, not only on the skin but in the architecture of my perception, like the entire nervous system re-tuned itself to a frequency I didn’t know existed, but now can’t un-hear. And I know, know in the way animals know weather, that this is not something I will move on from. I may continue, but I will not return. The ones that mark you aren’t always the ones you live with, but they are always, always the ones you live after.

And yes, there are counterfeits. False alarms. Addiction in formalwear. Trauma dressed as poetry. It’s a mess. But there’s a way to tell: counterfeit passion makes you feel smaller, like a child playing adult games without supervision. Authentic combustion, though – however brief – expands the room, even when it leaves you alone in it. The grief that follows isn’t punishment. It’s post-op pain after surgery you didn’t consent to but desperately needed.

And the tests, despite what romantic comedies would have us believe, are almost stupid in their subtlety. Does silence with them feel like rest or judgment? Do your ordinary habits, like folding laundry or boiling pasta, shimmer slightly, as if touched by something mythic? After the inevitable clash, because passion always disrupts comfort, does the world smell burnt or blessed?

There is no fair trade. You give up the luxury of lying to yourself. You lose your eligibility for small talk. And you inherit a kind of psychic hypersensitivity that ruins half of what used to pass for “nice”. But in return, you get something less comfortable and more sacred: the gut-level certainty that you are no longer available for the counterfeit. You have tasted the sacrament. The world cannot offer you a snack pack again.

“The Passenger” (1964) by Leonor Fini - (arthistoryproject.com)

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The fire doesn’t arrive when you are bracing for impact. It doesn’t knock when you are teetering at a crossroads, whispering for help, half-hoping to be rescued. No, real fire shows up when everything is fine. When you have finally made peace with the shape of your life, when your days are well-lit and your nights are mercifully quiet, when your furniture fits and your inbox doesn’t scare you and you can answer “How are you?” without flinching. My burn came not in crisis, but in calm. Everything was settled. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t searching. I wasn’t aching for more. And then, he walked in. Not dramatically, not like a storm breaking, but with a presence so assured it made the air shift. He was tall, yes, but it wasn’t his stature that undid me, it was the way he looked at me like he had already read every page, every margin note, every redacted passage I had tried to edit out of myself. Eyes that didn’t ask for directions; they knew the way in. And I let them…..

He went straight into my heart like he had been given the code, no fumble, no knocking, no prelude. Just entrance. And now, I know. Not believe. Not hope. Know. He will never leave. Not in the cheap, possessive sense of permanence, but in the truer, more disorienting way, the way certain people lodge themselves in the nervous system, rewiring memory and desire and all future understandings of proximity. He is unlike anyone I have ever known, not because he completes me – I was already whole – but because he sees the parts I hide even from myself, and doesn’t flinch. He knows me the way storms know coastlines: instinctively, intimately, without asking permission. There was nothing wrong with my life before he arrived. There still isn’t. But now, there is a before. And that’s how I know he is the one who burns, not just brightly, but permanently.

Recognition is not a trumpet. It’s the strange quiet when everything in you (heart, lungs, pelvic floor) stops arguing. It’s the committee disbanding. It’s the moment when yes is no longer a risk, but a return. And the paperwork is emotional, not legal.

We left the restaurant looking almost respectable – my coat abandoned on the back of a chair, his collar and neck branded with my lipstick, the night air around us faintly smoking – while everyone else dutifully finished dessert; we simply carried the meal inside us and kept walking. The world, in its insatiable appetite for tidy epilogues, keeps asking what happened next, but I refuse to serve the comfort of closure because nothing, in fact, closed: the fire stayed. It moved in like a lodger who pays in wonder, not rent, and now lives beneath my skin as a living sigil, a tattoo, its ink still wet enough to shimmer whenever he traces the lines with a glance. This isn’t aftermath; it’s continuation: a low, erotic hum that warms instead of scalds, a secret scripture pulsing along my nerves, rewriting every ordinary hour into something slightly lit from within. And so, on nights when the world feels too intact, I don’t miss the restaurant or the chaos of that first feast; I simply listen to the soft, familiar song of the burn still humming between us, grateful that the table, and the fire, were never truly cleared.

From beneath the skin where the ink is still wet and the fire still warm; with the echo of candlelight, heat, and the unsaid still folded into my dress; still glowing from the flame that didn’t consume, only revealed; not healed, not wounded, just rewritten where he touched the script; marked by a love that didn’t end but chose to stay – quiet, wild, and holy,

Tamara

Leonor Fini in Paris, 1938 - kasmingallery.com

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