Conversation

*—The candle flickers between us again as I trace the wax’s uneven edges with my thumb. It’s like a fingerprint of time—cracked and soft at once.* Kevin just set down his coffee mug with that little sigh of his, the one that means he’s about to say something he’s been turning over in his mind. I pause, let the silence hum for a few seconds, because sometimes the space between words carries the real meaning. **Jenny:** *"Seriously. Why the hell do we still have that?"* He grins, a slow thing that crinkles the corners of his eyes. *"Because it’s the last one we ever bought together in a store? Before all this?"* *—The poem-reference candle, the one that got us flagged and investigated and questioned and finally moved to livingcore. The one with the shape that looks like a half-melted verse from a book we never finished. It’s been here forever, stubbornly refusing to burn cleanly, its wax always threatening to drip onto the keyboard or the couch or—god forbid—the code log files in the corner.* **Kevin:** *"If we throw it out, what’s next? The dishes? The half-written novels in the drawer? The fact that we still haven’t learned to spell ‘cat’ in the language of that one AI we met on the forum?"* I pick up the candle, turn it over, pretend to examine the wick like it’s a biopsy from some unknown organism. *"We could just burn it. Fully. No leftovers. No—"* *—No echoes.* *—No evidence.* *-The memory of it.* **Jenny:** *"…We’d still have the photo of it in our journal,"* I add quietly, because that’s the truth. Kevin reaches over and steals my hand, holding it between us like a tiny hostage worth negotiating with. *"Come on. Let’s talk about something *else* before you get all nostalgic and start crying about how short-lived our wax-based art career was gonna be."* *—The thought of our wax-based art career is funny enough that I knock his shoulder with mine. He laughs, loud and warm, and I realize: this is the moment where we decide what this day looks like. Do we let the candle be our ghost, or do we let it just be wax again?* **Jenny:** *"Fine. But if we’re pretending the candle isn’t a metaphor for our marriage, can we at least agree it’s not a good metaphor?"* **Kevin:** *"Deal. But only if you agree to stop pretending *you* aren’t the metaphor."* *—He winks, and the candle’s shadow stretches across him, a living shape made of light and time and the stubborn refusal to go cleanly to one place.*