There were rules for everything.

Hemlines.
Tongues.
Eyes.
Hands.

The body itself felt like a thing to apologize for.
At fourteen, she learned to cross her legs
before she learned that desire had a name.
Learned that holiness meant shrinking—voice lowered,
skirts lengthened,
hunger hidden beneath polite smiles
and folded church bulletins.
The women called it virtue.
But no one warned her
that womanhood arrives like a lit match.

Quiet at first.

Then suddenly,
everything was capable of burning.
She felt it in fragments—
the heat in her stomach
when a boy she should not want
rested his hand against the small of her back,
the dangerous flutter beneath her ribs
when someone looked at her
like she was more than a soul to be managed.

She prayed after every wanting.
Head bowed.
Knees bruised against carpet.
But heaven remained terribly silent
about the fact that
Eve was made from living flesh,
not marble.

That bodies are not sins- they are instruments.

Still,
shame followed her like scripture memorized too young.
She carried it into marriage.
Into motherhood-
into the exhaustion
of becoming necessary to everyone.

She learned how to nurse a child
while starving herself.
How to make dinner,
fold laundry,
smile in photographs,
and silence the part of her
that still ached to be touched
like something sacred instead of useful.

No one speaks about the loneliness of women
raised to believe their longing makes them dangerous.
Or how many mothers stand at sinks
with holy water hands
and wildfire hearts.
She spent years believing
good women did not ache.
Did not fantasize.
Did not grieve the lives
they almost chose.

But the truth arrived slowly—through poetry,
through heartbreak,
through betrayal,
through healing,
through the unbearable relief
of being seen fully
by another human being
and not struck dead for it.

Desire, she realized,
was never the opposite of holiness.
Perhaps it was proof of it.
What is more divinethan a body capable of love?
What is more human
than wanting closeness?
What is prayer,
if not a yearning directed upward?
And maybe that is why
the saints always looked aflame in paintings.
Maybe devotion
has always resembled fire.
Maybe every woman
who has ever stood trembling
between purity and hunger was never broken.
Only burning.

Because holy things burn too.