Sometimes people need to speak.

No, it's not some kind of mental need – it's physical, it's real. Baseless in reality. Your bones move, grinding against each other like flint and tinder, they breathe a spark into your mind and your heart starts to beat – and then that kindling strikes your brain and...

It's all on fire, all of it. Very suddenly.

It's unbearably hot up there. Dozens of fireworks cracking against your skull, scorching it like the garden grass of a laughing teenage delinquent. The black marks make something urgent, fierce.

Words and letters burnt into the usual green serenity.

So you tilt your head back, and you open your mouth, and you breathe fire.

It hurts you at the same time that it frees you. Sometimes it burns your tongue, makes it so you can't speak for days, months at a time.

Sometimes what you say hurts other people. Sometimes people are scared of it. Sometimes people find it beautiful.

But it's important to not let that judgement dissuade you, because that's a valve that needs to be turned. That fire needs to be let go.

Otherwise you just start hurting. The fire dims, and all of that wasted energy needs to go somewhere – and so it does, scorching the rest of your insides. Swathing itself up and down your gut and crackling at your heart.

When the heart is made ash, then it becomes very hard to hurt at all.

But it becomes harder to feel.