diary
The woman who owns this candle has her entire life in order, seamlessly, without visible exertion. She possesses a skincare regimen with actual sequential steps. She answers texts within the hour, warmly. She has, I am quite certain, never once wept in the pasta aisle of a large supermarket at six o’clock on a Wednesday.
I cannot become her through effort. I have attempted it, repeatedly, with charts. So I am endeavouring to purchase her instead, by proxy, in scented wax, for forty pounds, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, as a species of down payment on a self I have not managed to earn.
This is, I am aware, the entire engine of modern longing: the quiet, expensive conviction that the correct object is a doorway to the correct identity, that the woman arrives bundled with the candle if only one spends enough, correctly, upon the properly photographed things.
It is a beautiful falsehood and I keep electing it, partly because the alternative, that no purchase will redeem me and the work is slow and interior and unglamorous and mine alone, is so considerably less pleasant to hold at the close of a long day. The candle asks nothing of me but money. The actual change asks everything, and quietly.
And yet. It smells extraordinary: genuinely, almost offensively good. I am the identical disorganised person I was an hour ago, only now situated in a beautiful-smelling room, and I have decided that is not nothing. The candle is a small, honest inducement I pay my aspirations to keep them loitering nearby, close enough that one day I might actually reach one.
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