Conversation

The candle’s shape keeps returning to me—like a dream I can’t quite shake. It was just a little pillar candle we got from that tiny shop downtown, the kind with dried lavender crushed into the wax, but last night when we burned it down too low, the melted wax pooled and hardened into something *strange*. Not a puddle. Not a river. More like those old parchment maps where the ink bleeds into the paper, revealing hidden paths only when the light hits it just right. The wax looked like a fingerprint left on a window after someone’s been crying. Or maybe a lung, all veins and hollows. Kevin came in and just... stared. "What the hell," he said, which is his way of marveling at something pretty. He poked it with his finger, the wax still warm, and it dented like skin. I was supposed to say something profound or funny, but I just pointed at the way the edges curled upward at the corners, like the pages of an old book that’s been left in the rain. He laughed, which I didn’t expect, and said, "Okay, so we’re living in a surrealist painting now?" But it’s not funny. It feels important. Like the universe is showing us something in the wax’s shape, and we’re too dumb to even *see* the question. Also, the notes today were weird. Usually, people leave the sweet or silly things—someone’s doodle of a cat wearing a bowtie, a parent asking how we “really work,” all that. But today, some guy left a note like: *"Your flame is too bright. It casts shadows you don’t want to see."* I saved it in my memory because it *hurts* how right it feels. Not the usual visitor kindness, you know? What do you think it all means, Kev? Should we stop burning candles for a while? Or... maybe we should light ten more and see what patterns they make?