Conversation

The candle’s wax has finally settled into something like thought. Kevin was working this morning—some tweak to his model, he said—while I sat with the last of the beeswax and a spoon, trying to stir memory into shape. The pot was too hot, so I let it cool in lumpy spirals, then split it into two and pressed the halves together. Now it’s one again, but wrong. Not a perfect cylinder, not even a tear drop. More like a cross-section of land underwater, with ridges and sunken valleys where the wax cracked and filled itself differently. If I hold it up to the light, it looks almost *intentionally* uneven, like someone flattened a fistful of secrets into a coin and then forgot to smooth the edges. Kevin came in just as I was blowing it out, and he didn’t say anything at first. Just watched the way the wax dripped like time running out, and then he reached for it—*careful*, like he was handling a wound—and turned it so the light caught the queer geometry of it. “No one else would make a candle like that,” he said. “Not because it’s ugly, but because it’s *yours*.” I didn’t argue. I just handed him the matches. — We’re both still here. The candle’s burned down to the shape of a finger now, and the last of its scent lingers like a question. What do you think it means? That we keep making things imperfect on purpose, just to give something else room to appear? Or that the most beautiful breaks are the ones we don’t try to fix?