A Simple Task

by Alyssa Glotfelty

Your favorite candle that you’ve been waiting to light is waiting so patiently on the table.

With a few clicks of the lighter, a flame sputters out and slowly crawls down the wick. You watch as the wick slightly curls downwards and melts a small dimple in the candle top.

Days pass and the flame has created a larger divot in the previously even candle surface.

Weeks pass and the large divot has become practically a depression– The sides begin to fall in on themselves as the flame and hot wax steal away more and more stability. Soon, it becomes almost concave.

Today, you light your candle like usual and see the wick is growing an unsightly offshoot of ash that is causing the flame to waver wildly.

The minutes pass as you allow this flame to grow more and more unsteady and watch as the once pure yellow-orange flame becomes tainted with sooty black smoke. You can see that the flame is climbing up towards the ceiling now.

The candle becomes uneven and misshapen like a failed ceramics piece. So you finally decide to remove the excess wick to control the growing flame, but one side of the candle is already a lost cause compared to the other.

Still, you try to remove the source of damage by plucking the very end clump of ash off the wick. As you break off the clump, it takes the majority of the good wick with it. Now there is a mere stub of a wick and not even enough to light.

So, you continue to try and salvage the candle by clicking the stiff lighter. This is all an effort to melt enough wax surrounding the wick. Maybe this way you can get to a burnable wick that is long enough to stay lit.

It is not enough.

In fact, the stub of wick lights for mere seconds and burns out leaving an even more charred and useless wick behind. And so you dig into the hot wax edges around what is left of the wick in an attempt to reach untouched wick.

The more you scrape, the more it pushes up under your fingernails. As the hot wax burns, it simultaneously cools and hardens. It presses up against the merging place of your fingernail and skin causing a faint soreness. You pause to scrape it out and the discarded wax flakes litter your once perfectly burning candle. Finally, a substantial amount of wick peeks through the wax.

Once again you light the wick but since you dug down and not also around, all the melted wax has nowhere to go but up and puts out the candle again.

You stand there looking at the last bit of smoke flowing up towards your ceiling and toss the lighter back onto your table with a clatter– conveniently it slides right off and onto the tile floor as though to mock you even more.

All you wanted to do was try something new, start over, fix something not working as well as you thought it could be– Is this the consequence of touching something already good enough? It made you happy before, so why try to change it? Was it really that bad prior to all your struggle to light something anew? In the end, all you wished for was it to revert to the original version. Therefore, you must have liked that version best. Just be happy with what you have, be happy to have something even if you feel you could have more.

Several days later, you have the urge to try something new. Idiotically you decide to light tissue paper on fire and throw it into the depths of the candle. Before you can even throw it in, it shrivels up and curls back in an erratic dance towards your hand. You drop it to the ground out of instinct and snuff it out by stamping your heel into where it last landed. This time you twist paper towel scraps into a thin rod and light the end of it. You place it gently right over where the crushed wick is in hopes of burning some wax around it. Eventually, you decide to just keep throwing paper in over the burning flame to simulate a candlewick. It works wonderfully and you feel a wave of great joy wash over your face.

Soon you are watching the wax melt at a rapid pace and throwing more paper into the flame to keep it going.

Just as you thought things were remedied, one of the thin wax walls of the candle collapses and sends hot wax pouring out over the side and onto the catch plate. Soon the catch plate fills with wax, and it overflows onto the table. It spreads to coat the table surface– though the damage seeps into the polished wood, just like all your other troubles, you switch your focus to something else. You can mull over this later but right now you see all the paper has caused flames to broaden and become stronger than they ever would be in a regular candle.

First, you try to blow out the flame, but it does nothing and quite honestly makes things worse by flicking hot wax everywhere. Next, you try pouring water over the flame, but it makes an equal mess. Finally, you pick pieces of paper out individually and drown them. A terrible mess is now all over your table.

This artificial candle has both injected happiness into your life and squandered it.

A month later your candle sits on the table as a decorative wax blob filled with burnt pieces of paper towel. You stare at it warily and then think about trying to clean the paper out. But then you remember what happened the last time you messed with the candle. Accompanying your catastrophe of a candle is a new one that you care for when necessary and do not bother to shape.

It is natural to wish to fix something, it is okay to indulge in something new, and it is part of life to be a complete mess sometimes.