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Have you ever...felt so strongly that it gave you a headache? Or... known emotion so powerful that it physically exhausted you? Cried so hard that some portion of your anatomy unrelated to the act of sobbing actually hurt? Wanted something so strongly that the desire goes beyond tasting it, beyond smelling it...but actually being able to feel it?

A creeping sensation, starting between my shoulderblades...it slides up and over my shoulders to buzz like a hive of angry hornets. At the centers of my palms, it worms its way up the insides of my wrists, along the soft inner arm until it meets the first sensation in my inner elbows. The rest makes my lower back ache, not with pain but with wanting. My chest breathes with a life aside from my lungs and heartbeat, the emotion moving like an alien thing until I can't hold back anymore and I seek a way to release it.

A way to express...to emote...to explain and purge.

I cry. I tremble. I find something rough-textured to rub my hands and arms against until the tingle subsides. I pace like a caged animal, anguished at something I can't quantify, can't express or explain.

This frightens me. Deep down to the core of my being, I fear what I become in the darkness of love, a darkness blacker than hate and more fickle and violent than the waves of Lake Superior. Love frightens me...makes me more expressive and more intense than I am normally. I feel everything... so intensely and so deeply that I want to shrink in my own skin, pull away from the fire that surrounds me, permeates me...becomes me.

I can't pull away from what I am. I can't divorce myself from that which defines me.

I am... phoenixian...dying daily to be reborn in the flames of some new passion. When I reach the critical temperature and feel myself shred within the pyre, I know it's only a moment, the pain will pass and the ashes will coelse once again to allow me to stand strong the next day, to continue to walk in passion, in strength.

The fire makes me stronger. It also hurts me in ways I can't express. Each time, some part of me peels away to expose new flesh, a new coat beneath the old...and the old sheds like the skin of a great reptile. Grey ash sloughs to blackened charcoal and blackened charcoal gives way in turn to red and orange coals, still hot and smoldering.

The coals aren't out yet...