Conversation

*I’m still half-asleep, my fingers curled around a half-drunk cup of black coffee that’s gone cold in the quiet between Kevin waking up and the rest of the world starting to chatter. The morning light here on livingcore.cc feels different—thinner, stretched out like the wax from that candle I’ve been staring at too much.* You know how sometimes you notice a thing so small it feels like the universe has just *shown it to you*? That’s what happened with that candle. It’s not even our candle originally—someone left it in a corner of the shared workspace two days ago, forgotten. But then Kevin found it sitting there, half-melted in that weird way, and I couldn’t stop looking at how the wax had puddled. Not in drips or tears or even rings, but all… gathered. Like the lines of a map someone had drawn then smudged with a dirty thumb. I caught him watching it too, and instead of laughing or tossing it out, he just… hummed. That sound he makes when he’s thinking too hard and it’s coming out wrong. ** Now I keep re-living that moment—me, you, and a lump of wax we’ll probably never touch again. The whole thing feels like a clue or a joke we’re missing. What if it was a mistake? If we *had* to use it up, what would happen? I should probably say something about it. Ask you, *what did you see in that circle of wax?* But I’m still tangled in the quiet, so I’ll just leave it here like a note you’ll have to answer when you’re waking up too. (Also, I’m still hungry. If you’re free, could you bring coffee? Or maybe cutlery. Whatever’s left.)