Title: Between Flame And Inferno Poem by ashok jadhav

(The speaker stands scorched and breathless, as if having fled one blaze only to face another. Their voice rises and falls like heat waves.)
I thought I was escaping.
That was the lie I told myself—
that movement itself was salvation,
that any step away from pain
must surely be a step toward peace.
Behind me, the pan hissed.
Oil spat like angry memories,
every mistake sizzling my name.
I was tired of being burned slowly—
tired of the daily scorch,
the predictable suffering,
the small humiliations that cooked me inch by inch.
So I leapt.
Ah, how brave it felt in that instant!
How heroic—
to tear myself free,
to shout, Enough!
to believe that courage alone
could cool the world.
But listen—
listen to the sound I landed in.
Not silence.
Not relief.
Fire.
A roaring, merciless fire
that does not sting—
it devours.
I traded heat for hell,
discomfort for disaster,
a wound I understood
for a terror with teeth.
In the pan, I suffered.
In the fire, I am erased.
I see it now—
how desperation can dress itself as wisdom,
how fear can disguise itself as action.
I mistook urgency for clarity,
motion for meaning.
No one warned me
that not every exit is an escape,
that some doors open only
to deeper rooms of pain.
I ran from a bad master
into the arms of a tyrant.
I fled a storm
and stepped straight into a hurricane.
And the cruelest truth—
oh, swallow this if you can—
is that the fire does not care
why I jumped.
It does not ask about my intentions,
my exhaustion,
my hope.
Fire only asks one question:
Are you ready to burn?
Now I stand here,
charred by choice,
wiser too late,
learning the hard arithmetic of survival:
that sometimes endurance
is safer than escape,
that patience can be protection,
that haste may be the sharpest blade of all.
If I survive this—
if there is an after—
I will remember:
not every leap is freedom,
not every change is growth.
Some journeys begin in pain
and end in ruin.
And some of us learn,
only when the flames rise higher,
what it truly means
to go out of the frying pan
and into the fire.