Szaloncica sips his
dark beer, smokes once again his pipe and contemplates the brilliant
and brief light of the tobacco burning in the depth of his pipe. The
candle is still alighted, spreading a tiny and tremulous light
through the Szalon. The candle is certainly a star. Its mechanism is
akin to the inner atomic motor that makes stars last for centuries,
thousands of centuries, eons that even Szaloncica struggles to
conceive. Szaloncicas have a very special relationship with time.
Incidentally, it may be worth mentioning the abilities of Cicas for
breathing time, for inhabiting time, like if they were able to expand
every second and occupy it way much better, let's say, than the
human's clumsiness regarding the consideration of any real use of
time. That's why, let's pursue this digression a few seconds more, a
Cica seems to sleep, when he or she is actually living at a different
and slower and more intense speed. Anyway, it is agreed, candles are
like stars. They burn out of their own matter. Its size, the
gravitational force of its incredible mass, compresses the core and
fuses atoms, hydrogen, helium. The result is this endless atomic
reaction. Slow, fed by the star itself that lives and dies at every
second, its power being the root of its inevitable decay. The star
will end in a supernova, a white dwarf, a dark hole: the emphatic
negation of a star, a well so deep that light, not even the strength
of desires can avoid to be sucked in for ever. But such a kind of
catastrophy is still thousands of years away from us. Anyway, the
candle burns in a similar way, surely with a much less dramatic and
bombastic end. The wick burns immediately once lighted. It looks like
as any matter that burns so easily, soon it will be just an ugly dark
thread cold and inert. But the light flares high only for a second:
soon the heat melts the wax, and the wick sucks the wax up, and in
the end it is the wax that shines in flame: it is the wax that burns,
not the wick. The wax permeates the wick, every thread and particle
of the wick, the former disappears in the latter. But the wick's fire
does not melt right away the wax, it is not that hot: warm enough for
melting little by little the wax that will feed the wick, and the wax
will fuel the wick's fire that will produce the right amount of heat,
for, in its turn, keeping melting slowly the wax. A perfect cycle,
once ignited, of slow passion through endless embrace and fire.
Szaloncica's definition of love. The wick is black, the wax is red,
thinks joyously Szaloncica.
