Candles.

[kiya]

As darkness fell I went for a walk.

I bought two candles, and brought them home.

I couldn't find my candle-holders, so I grounded them in a flowerpot, and the dead twigs of the dead houseplant that had lived there before twined around them.

I lit them, side by side.

They left interesting cascades of wax, clear sky-blue, clear sky wax, puddled around the spurs of a deceased rosebush.

---

Kevin came home as the candles were burning low. He asked me why I wasn't watching the game; I said I wanted to keep the amount of light in the room low when the candles were going. He understood.

When we did put the game on, there was a commercial. Which is, I suppose, to be expected. This one had a bunch of row houses, and a voiceover or text -- I'm so upset that I can't remember anymore -- saying how a year ago some people wanted to change the face of America.

It cut to the same sequence of row houses. This time every one of them had a flag. Some of them two.

I made some acid comment. Kevin said that wasn't what they meant.

I said it didn't matter.

---

I think what scares me the most is the feeling that . . . I don't have space to figure out what I feel, how to react. It's media-blitz here, media-blitz there. The Chinese restaurant where I bought my dinner was watching some of the news replays, or something, I was hearing the voice commentary while I waited for my food. I wanted to get home and light my candles. That was all I wanted -- space and time to do the thing that felt meaningful to me. I described it to oneironaut as "the right artwork to make". It burned, it lasted, it left sky blue wax.

A year later, I still don't have space.

Next year, will this actually be called "Patriot Day"? (An apellation that I, as a native of Massachusetts, will object to mildly, for the nonce, in a moment of whimsy, now that I can find moments of whimsy.)

Will there be space next year to find a space to figure out what I feel, what I believe, outside of the flag-wavings and public displays, and my reaction to the flag-wavings and the public displays? Will these things just get out of my life long enough that I can figure out what I feel, what I need to work through?

I don't know.

I'm afraid they'll never give me peace.

And that's why I'm crying now.

---

A year ago, at about eleven, Kevin called me and woke me up to tell me what happened. I spent time trying to make contact with brooksmoses and suzimoses and my father -- my father who sometimes works in the Pentagon. Just touch, find people, hold on.

I got up, came downstairs, I got on rasseff, I followed the discussion -- its helplessness, its ongoing, updated reports about people still missing, people found, its helpless geeking and infuriated ranting and . . . all of that.

I saw some of the news footage that night on the news. I turned it off. I couldn't bear to watch, couldn't . . . take it, stand it, this thing could not be borne.

---

Today, I mourn my inability to know what it is I need to mourn.

Because today that's all I have.

That and the melted shards of two candles, side by side, amongst the wreckage of a dead flower.

I don't have the peace to find anything else.