Self-Ashtualisation

Teachers are like candles, extinguishing themselves to fight—oops—light their students’ paths, or so they say as sweat and blood, ignited by the fire of self-denial drip-drip-drip on and on and on and down in the form of candle wax singeing every inch of our collected, collective bones no longer humanly recognisable, shadowed by selfless shadows.   I am, not so, but too sorry to tell you Miss M, that unfortunately your candle wax has scorched my renewing, six-year-old skin the most. I’m rubbing one of the mottled patches now, the pain has hardened, been harnessed, intensified, just like – or probably very different to – the door you’ve used to bar yourself from self-love, the same one that has served you well into your relentless, hot-headed, cold-hearted wax-dripping candlehood, which I’ve now realised, perhaps too late, is born out of your burnt-out selflessness.   If I had known then what you’d been through, Miss M, I would have spoken to you