E:KO ᛟ HEIR — Time, Burnt Beautifully

Candle time is honest because it only moves forward. Forty to fifty hours sounds like a number until you start spending it. Then the unit becomes real: an evening is two hours, a long conversation is three, a quiet stretch with a book is somewhere in between. I like measuring nights this way. It pulls time out of abstraction and gives it weight you can watch in the glass.

I decide whether Tuesday deserves two hours of flame, and the question improves Tuesday. At first there is only light, then a trace of scent that might be imagined, then presence—a room edited by patience. Small milestones appear: first full pool, the halfway burn where the wick sits perfectly centred, the last ten hours when attention sharpens because the count is finite.

Endings have a different brightness. Not literal—perception. Every minute feels slightly magnified, as if the flame knows it is writing the last lines of its diary. I avoid stretching the final burn across a week of fragments; I give it one long evening and let it finish like a song played to the end.

When the flame is gone, time doesn’t vanish; it changes form. The vessel holds the memory of each hour the way a photograph holds light—silent evidence. I clean the glass, leave it empty for a while as a small monument to spent time, then put it back to work.

There’s mercy in objects that end; they teach attention better than those that promise forever. I don’t need eternity. I need a handful of hours that I actually noticed. That is what the candle offers: a finite quantity of light and scent, exchanged for a finite quantity of evening—both made better because the other was there.