If I call this love,
it is only because language has no gentler word
for two endings arriving at the same time.
Look at the candles.
How they stand apart at first,
certain of their separate shapes,
certain their bodies belong only to themselves.
The fire knows otherwise.
It begins as a whisper,
a small persuasion of heat,
teaching wax how to surrender.
Slowly-
their sides soften.
Boundaries loosen.
What once seemed permanent
slips downward in shining red rivers,
pooling at their feet
where distinction goes to die.
Perhaps that is what devotion is:
not the refusal of death,
but the refusal to face it alone.
The candles do not fear their burning.
They spend themselves willingly,
trading body for brightness,
breath for flame,
future for a few more moments
beneath the same light.
And as they diminish,
they grow closer.
Not in distance-
in substance.
Wax touches wax.
Fire touches fire.
Until neither can remember
where one life ended
and the other began.
The room calls this dying.
The candles call it becoming.
Their bodies collapse into each other
with the quiet certainty of rivers meeting the sea,
and when the last flame finally closes its eye,
there are no two remains.
Only a single pool of crimson wax,
cooling in the dark
like a shared grave
that cannot tell its dead apart.
And if there is tragedy here,
it is a beautiful one:
that they burned their entire lives
toward the privilege
of disappearing together.