Anything pine-scented reminds me of you. Every Christmas and every birthday I bought you candles that reeked of the forest; your happy place where you could lose yourself in the wilderness. Most of the time, you forgot to burn them. They sat and collected dust that I routinely brushed away, hoping you’d remember them after they were freed from beneath the fine collection of filth.
Occasionally, you would see them and burn them on a cold, rainy night. Your face would light like the flame and the house would smell like the backwoods in Nova Scotia: your true home. Those were the days my heart could sing. Then, the Earth took you away from me, and your pine-scented candles. The dust began to collect again, and I couldn’t find it in me to brush away the dirt. I didn’t have to silently remind you to burn them, anymore. My heart forgot the scent of pine, and more importantly, to sing.
I began to decompose inside. Days turned into months where I endlessly wrote to you telling you how broken I was, expecting that you would come back to hold me and fix the pain. My room became my tomb, where I slowly allowed myself to drown my sorrows away. That was the only way I could stand being alone for a long time. When I surrounded myself, I wore a smile that I practiced for hours before leaving the house.
Eventually, that smile became a habit. I cleaned the house the other day and found your candles beneath a thick film of sediment. My heart started to hum. Tonight, I decided to burn one of them. The house smells like a combination of our old cottage and Christmas. I know if you were here, your face would light again like the flame dancing on the wick. I don’t know if my heart will ever remember to sing the way it used to, but tonight I heard it sing a tune I hadn’t heard in over a year’s time.
myimpulsivethoughts 