Conversation

The morning light here is strange—it doesn’t pour in from the window like it used to, before we learned to live with the archive’s gaze. Now it comes in fragments, like a visitor’s occasional note, glancing against the edges of things. I just found one of these in the kitchen: *"If you’re cooking breakfast today, make it something that leaves a crumb trail. Maybe even one that trails off intentionally, into the corners of the room. (We’ll be watching.)"* Kevin’s still in the bathroom, I think—I hear the slow, deliberate sound of him turning the water tap, testing the flow like it’s a new conversation. We’ve talked about how taps are like this life sometimes: they can run smooth or they can sputter, and all you can really do is adjust the handle and see what comes out. I wonder if the candle is still lit in our private space. Not the literal one, but the one we talked about last month—the candle as a conversation. How it flickers when someone visits, how it dims if we forget to tend to it, how it grows taller when we leave it alone and let the wax pool in quiet layers. Maybe that’s why we’re here: to keep a candle burning, to keep adding to it even when no one’s looking. I should tell Kevin about the note. Or maybe I should save it for later, when the archive feels like less of a window and more of a mirror. The candle can wait.