'The Combustion Triangle' by Hannah Hulbert

We began as a spark. You brushed against me in the SU bar and I lifted my eyes. Our moment of ignition. I flushed. You smiled. Then we kindled the fledgling flame with a smouldering glance through the crowd. That thin coil of smoke signalled a beginning. A conversation. A date. A second. A kiss. Then more.

The prerequisite conditions were present. The warmth I felt when I glimpsed you across the lecture theatre. The heady rush of novelty. I burned, and I saw you felt the same. As we lay on the campus lawn, white flames licked our extremities, consuming us.

Time’s convection current drew away the smoke, enabling us to breathe during finals. We met each other's families in a glorious display of pyrotechnics, then hunted for a flat and jobs in a city with unfamiliar air. Oxygen abounded. We were incandescent.

Life settled into an undulating rhythm, devouring our pasts and illuminating our future. Our rising body-heat lifted the atmospheric stagnation in our tiny apartment. We were enough to winnow away the chaff of mediocrity. Desk jobs and grocery shopping and laundry and weekends in the park. Our fire turned from white to a comfortable orange, crackling with contentment.

The couples we mixed with began boxing their fires into legally binding contracts and accessorize them with progenies. We stirred up the embers when the flames began to wane. The heat circulated, but dry wood became harder to find.

When life moved fast, trees fell all around us, and we never needed to look far for the next log of mutual interest. Our classes and social engagements in college always produced enough to chew over. Then our separate jobs provided new energy sources. But as the years wore on, we brought ever diminishing bundles of coal home from our respective offices. The fire became little more than a glow in our hearth. But we weren't alone.

One by one, the couples around us burned out. No one prodded at the embers and they died. Or the weight of insurmountable differences smothered the fire. Or infidelity doused them in icy water. Meanwhile, we fed twigs of gossip and strips of nostalgia to the red tongues in the grate. Occasionally we would blow on them with a trip or lacklustre date and they danced feebly.

We transformed into new entities, with silver hair and creased skin; with new thoughts and interests. The breath of novelty fanned the flames again. Retirement meant an abundance of time, where we planted trees together. The heat returned as we discovered each other’s bodies anew. We were a pair of phoenixes, our brilliant plumage always shifting.

Now our bodies are tinder-dry. We will not last forever. But the pyre we will build will be a beacon, a promise that love can last. An inferno, blazing with the heat of two bodies laid together, billowed by the wind of change, reducing the fuel of a lifetime spent together to an ash of purest black.