sjsprWriting

When I was young I used to have this table, you see. I really don’t suppose it was anything special; pine wood, coffee-bean colored with dark splotches that matched the outer rings of my eyes. Staring at the table, not being able to peel my eyes away, it was the kindest petrifaction I could have ever felt. Like needle-beaked air fibers pecking at my sealed-plastic frame, my composure seeped out of the tiny holes that encumbered my figure. But I was never staring at just the table, no. Every night, someone in my family- I didn’t really ever know who- would saunter to the edge of the table and, like pulling my body out of my own snug-fit atmosphere to be broken over a wooden house hiding in a sliver of glinting trees, would place a candle; always beige, light it, and evaporate from the room. I would remember myself begging them not to, but sometimes I don’t think any sound really left my mouth. My vocal chords probably knew better than me. No whimper would get past the doormat outside the front door, never. And it’s not like they looked at me, ever saw the depressions boring into my face. Whether there was ill intention, well, I didn’t bother much to find out. After a few years I kind of just went numb, no more questions, no more thoughts. Just a flame to evanish the figments of my imagination that tip-toed on my ceiling, grabbed my shoulders, or occasionally brushed across my knees and made my singed arm hairs stand up. And there would be the candle, billowing a plume of white vapor that seemed to pass right through me. Sometimes, I couldn’t help but think that I saw myself burning away in that incessant smoke, lending my hand, trying to bring myself back, but forgetting my essence in a spout of vapid exhaustion. Soon enough, I’d find myself sprawled under the table, my eyes tracing the blackened outline of hot wax searing through its underside, like a hungry wolf staring at the piercing light of a full moon. I dreamed of when the table could handle no more, to when its tiny splinters gave out and the candle would fall through its own trapdoor and be extinguished. Then I’d break through my trance and run so fast out the front door that my legs would detach themselves and regenerate a new me, one less melted and disfigured. I’d follow the horizon of pine trees, and without the slightest hesitation, I would burn them all. And that rotten table would burst into ash, its legs no longer able to support itself and that putrid candle. And the house that took away so many years would boil away into an assortment of nothing. I’d find a clearing in the forest, lay my head, and look to the moon as it hovered safely above the flames that licked the blisters of my eyes into a river of beige that shattered off of my skin. I’d breathe the cold emanating from the snow-laden moon, its pull of gravity cradling me to a soft lull. It would light the sky for my last days, the sky- candle-lit for me.