Meditation on a candle (with Wandering Gata in the background). 2

 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.