The answer, as you've acknowledged, to your original question is in Jack's first response.

Other concepts to play with in visualizing what's going on are;

-Only vapors will burn.

-When talking about atoms, e.g. oxygen, carbon, hydrogen it isn't the atom itself that burns, after combustion the compound structure that contained those atoms has changed state, but those atoms are still those atoms. They may rejoin with other atoms to form other compounds, e.g. CO2, CO, H2O, NOX, etc from combustion of gasoline (a range of various size HC molecules, which also contain other junk, combined with atomospheric air, O, N, H20, +other junk)