That light between smoke and wax dripping

So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear. —Milton

I
Often we use the same thing to escape what has gotten us into it in the first place — like punching a face to stop it from bleeding. And that’s how he’d come to see this candle she lights, because it reminds him. It reminds him when it is lit and when it’s put out. And he’d never do nothing with these reminders except chew every bit of light out of them.

II
It is a Tuesday, and the end of a long workday was happening, changing: the bedroom darkening, cooling, with the drapes on the nearby window uncurling open with each of the breezes that could be heard while proceeding through the leaves outside. He lay on his back in bed, looking up. She is beside him, watching. And though it starts out simple and beautiful there inevitably follows the recognition for what it is all worth. And then the next thing you know they are like the miners holding gloves on to ropes to pull up the gold and gray parts of the mountain, being inside-chipped. “Where are you?” she then says, always. “What?” “Where are you?” “What are you talking about?” “Where are you?” It went on like this for a minute. They just kept asking each other questions. For which answers were hard to find. Rather, a period of quiet coming; or a gulfing, spreading — an ensuing to make the little lovers minus hard-on love but with the everyday monotony of being everyday lonely a bit. And it’s not even like things were that bad. They don’t cheat. Don’t diabolically rot inside and don’t know it. Nor are they certain that things are forever, either. And I guess you could say they devote. But still they often drift, away. Even when they are together — like say eating or watching whatever. Or when lying in bed. And habitually, then, two things happen: she searches, and he vacates. But not necessarily in that order. Because it’s less about temporality than it is about how we’ve been wired before ever meeting. It’s like we all have rivers in our heads, and our moments are first swept into them before leaking back out into what happens—

III
A sideways turn with his body, and his back put toward her. And then eyes on an east wall bland and coolly lit with a vast layer of shadows being stripped by the night coming up. Shuffling, then, is felt beside him. Followed by the sound of the nightstand drawer opening. And soon scratches come: the fingers rubbing nail tips as she reaches — paper being pushed, aside — the rasp of a stoked match. And then the smell of sulfur hits because the smell of sulfur doesn’t know any other way to hit it. Yet it fades quickly — with the sense in his nose being replaced by sight following the flickering gold that is thrown up in glow across the east wall. Things, then, becoming okay again — with her edging up, and her tits touching the bend of his back as her chin hardly rests on his left shoulder pointing up. Anything, then, terrible and mud-caked into what’s coarse less so as he blinks slow and takes a deep breath. And the moment: it is good. And so it feels good. And it is a thick feel — not unlike one gets in one’s throat when a substance is swallowed that’s been impatiently torn at.

IV
Perhaps, though, that was part of the problem, as he’d had a habit of needing to shove the good into him with a hope it then perpetuates like a fountain in his body. But it won’t. Never has. Rather inciting him instead. Like say with them laying there for instance — there in the quieting with the candle still lit — this moment, it had a centering effect, one ordering him back to her presence instead of gauging the candle’s smoke to see whether or not it fades back into the missing smell of burned things. Yet when he is present he wants to touch her. Hold her. Cup her in his hand — like a figurine. Yet by wanting it begins again. And nothing is never better because of it.

V
So lately he’d been wondering if it is just best to a light candle for no other reason than needing to see. Since you are bound to be disappointed otherwise.

And deep down we all know this. Yet still it never stops us from trying. Maintaining, always then, that block of infiltrating awareness that when you wish upon a star it is really your tiny face and head below that tent of enormous night. Not vice versa. And then before you know it, you begin wishing on everything — even the sun, the light. Until finally there is nothing left but the ritual of precluding whatever it was you wanted.

And maybe that’s why he’d been getting tired of buying her candles, and why she’d been getting tired of needing them. But because of hope she wants them. And because of hope he buys them. Then she lights them. And then they lay, wait, burn wax and pile matches.