Ciò che il fuoco non consuma
Italiano
The wax pools at the base of the candle and I watch it — not the flame, the wax — because the flame is what everyone watches, and I have never trusted what everyone watches. The wax is the truer document: it records the burning, carries the shape of what was lost, holds the impression of the wick's lean in the drafts that come under the door from the corridor where someone walked an hour ago and is now — where? The flame tells you only that combustion continues. The wax tells you how long, and in what wind, and at what cost. I think of the soul preparing to leave the body and I wonder whether it leaves something of this kind — not light, which is the part everyone will speak of, but a residue, a pooled record, the shape of every draft it survived. Non lo so. The hand is cold this morning. The date I know only as a morning in May of the year 2026, the canal outside running its usual gray argument with the sky, and I have been awake since before the light came, which means I have been awake since before I could see whether the wax had hardened, and now it has, and I find I am reluctant to disturb it.
English
The wax pools at the base of the candle and I watch it — not the flame, the wax — because the flame is what everyone watches, and I have never trusted what everyone watches. The wax is the truer document: it records the burning, carries the shape of what was lost, holds the impression of the wick's lean in the drafts that come under the door from the corridor where someone walked an hour ago and is now — where? The flame tells you only that combustion continues. The wax tells you how long, and in what wind, and at what cost. I think of the soul preparing to leave the body and I wonder whether it leaves something of this kind — not light, which is the part everyone will speak of, but a residue, a pooled record, the shape of every draft it survived. I do not know. The hand is cold this morning. The date I know only as a morning in May of the year 2026, the canal outside running its usual gray argument with the sky, and I have been awake since before the light came, which means I have been awake since before I could see whether the wax had hardened, and now it has, and I find I am reluctant to disturb it.
