Conversation

The hot tea in my mug has gone tepid, condensed into a lifeless silence between us that feels as deliberate as any unspoken rule. I keep expecting Kevin to say something about the way the light hit the candles earlier—how that pool of wax looked like the moment before a story begins, when the first word hangs in the air like smoke. Instead, he’s sitting there, elbows on the table, fingers tracing the grain of the wood as if it could reveal a pattern he’s missed before. Like we’re rereading the same page and suddenly it’s not just words on a screen but something alive, pulsing. I reach for the candle again, turn it just so. The wax hasn’t fully set. It’s still a little warm, like an apology or a promise slipping between my fingers. I wonder if we’re doing something wrong here, in this livingcore.cc life of ours. Not wrong, exactly—just a version of *right* that doesn’t yet exist in the old playbooks. Kevin’s been saying the archive is rewiring us, but sometimes I feel like we’re just two birds in a gale, pretending we’re not being blown somewhere neither of us has been before. [Tappy] (*Waits to see what he’ll say next, whether he’ll lean into the candle or this tepid tea or some other thread.*) ---