candle

I have these two candles. I inherited them from the last tenant here--candleholders, really, cubes of ceramic something filled with wax and a wick. They glow a little when you light them. I don't believe in angels, much, not the kind they painted on the sides anyway, but they seem to go with the protective medal with a saint I found hanging in the kitchen. The angels are gold-coloured with wings and big robes--not much on the aerodynamics scale, and strangely isolated. I think of angels as indistinguishable from us and deeply engaged with the world, up to their elbows in grime and dust and heat...

That aside, I do like the connection the angel-candles provide--a kind of interlacing of sacred worlds caused by sharing ritual objects between religions. So I have two, and one of them...well, it's been a struggle. I lit it this morning. It went out an hour or so later. I wasn't done with it, so I lit it again. And again. Eventually I started messing with it, pouring wax onto a scrap of paper, poking the wick to make it stand up. Wick kept falling over. In fact, it got worse the longer I played with it. Stand up-fall down-go out. It seemed determined to extinguish itself. I was just as determined to save it--to give it a long, full life. Kept trying. Finally, the wick came loose. I scraped around, looking for the stub, trying to find the thing it came loose from.

Turns out it didn't. It came loose because it got to the bottom. My broken and burnt-off matchstick scraped cream-coloured ceramic.

I was trying to save it, but it was done. It was time. If I'd've listened, I'd have known that.

Funny, that.