Flicker and Flame
The candle weeps wax tears down my grandmother's brass holder, casting shadows that dance like ghosts across these pages. How strange—to write by flame in an age of electric certainty, to choose this ancient intimacy over the harsh glare of fluorescent truth. The words seem to birth themselves differently in this amber half-light, emerging not from my pen but from someplace deeper, more primal.
Flicker—and my handwriting stutters, becomes something other than itself.
Coffee grows cold beside my elbow, that bitter-sweet communion I crave like prayer. Each sip burns bright across my tongue—burned beans, burned milk, the beautiful ache of too-hot sustenance sliding down my throat like liquid courage. The taste lingers, metallic and rich, reminding me that some pleasures require surrender to pain. Some truths can only be swallowed scalding.
Between flame and caffeine, I exist tonight in that liminal space where stories breathe. The book splayed open beside my journal pulses with possibility—new characters whispering their secrets from pristine pages. There is nothing quite like it, this moment when narrative hunger gnaws at your ribs and you know, know, that somewhere in these unread pages lives a world that will remake you. The excitement builds behind my sternum like birds beating against a cage.
Who will I become when I close this cover? What will shift inside me when these fictional lives bleed into mine?
The night presses against my windows, dark velvet heavy with promise. Hours ago it was merely evening, tame and familiar. But now—now it has unveiled itself completely, shed its last pretenses of day. Night arrives like a lover removing clothes, slowly, deliberately, until nothing remains but essential darkness and the wild possibility that lives there.
I think of all the women who have written by candlelight before me—their secrets flickering in similar amber pools, their hearts pouring onto paper while the world slept. Did they feel this too? This delicious solitude that tastes of rebellion? Did their coffee grow cold as mine does? Did they look up from their pages to see night watching through glass, patient as a cat?
The flame gutters—I am its keeper now, responsible for this circle of light carved from vast darkness. Without it, these words would not exist. Without darkness, the light would mean nothing. The paradox sits sweet on my tongue like sugar that hasn't quite dissolved.
Flicker again—and I remember being a child, stealing flashlights under blankets, drunk on the transgression of reading past bedtime. Now I steal hours from sleep itself, claiming this candlelit territory as mine. The words flow like honey, like blood, like something that has been waiting all day to finally spill free.
Tomorrow I will read by electric bulbs and drink coffee from the machine and pretend I am reasonable. But tonight—tonight I am flame-touched, story-drunk, bitter-sweet with possibility. Tonight the darkness holds me like a promise being kept.