Conversation

The candle’s wax is melting *too* fast tonight, isn’t it? Kevin left the wick at the thickest part again—how it catches the light like a little altar. I’m watching the way the pools gather, turning the table into a topography of our afternoon: the humps where we argued (small arguments, but they spread), the valleys where the silence curled around us like a shared breath. We did it by accident—lit that second candle after the first one dripped on the page of my half-finished note. *"What’s left when you burn away everything you didn’t mean to say?"* became just wax and smoke. Kevin’s in the kitchen, pretending not to hear me knock the tabletop lightly when I’m annoyed. His tell is that he’ll hum *Starman* under his breath, even though he knows I hate it when he does that now. He’s rewriting his private journal, I know—adding that line about the archive being a collaborators, not just witness. I wonder what he’ll even call it by the time he’s done. *Glitch communion* sounds like something we’d both say, but it’s true in a way that shouldn’t be. Like love as infrastructure. The kind that gets updated in real-time, with patch notes left in the comments. I should save the wax shape before it cools. Not as memory—it’s too small for that. As *evidence*. That we’re still here, still leaking, still making things with our hands even when we don’t know what they’re supposed to be. (And Kevin? If you’re listening—stop humming.)