🕯Candles Fail🕯 (Him pt. 5)

 

She lived inside a house that breathed too slowly. With walls groaning when the night settled in. With floorboards creaking like reminders that she was not enough.

Lonely was not the right word;

lonely had sharp edges.

This was heavier, like being drowned by her own reflection.

Candles lined the halls, their smoke pressed into the wallpaper. Their flames a fragile mask. She lit them because she had to.

Because in their glow she could at least see where the shadows ended.

But each candle carried a whisper:

"You are selfish. You are careless. You fail, again and again."

She believed them.

How could she not? She had no proof otherwise. She had no memory of what success even felt like.

The house was not cruel, just cruel enough.

Not safe, but not a battlefield either. Only intimidating her, its silence louder than her own thoughts.

And she stayed. Because leaving meant abandoning the only light she knew.

She had already run from one home. Slammed out so fast the door sealed forever; she would not make herself homeless again.

So she kept to her candles.

She tended them with trembling hands, eyes burning, body heavy from holding up so much fragile light.

She thought this was her life.

This half-dark. This half-home. This unending chorus of "not-enough."

And then, not a candle.

Not smoke, or a whisper of firey shame. But a radiance. Bold, unshaken;

Filling every corner with color the walls had never known. The air moved like it had just remembered how to breathe.

The silence cracked open into song.

Her trembling stilled. Her failures lost their echo. Her house became a place worth living in.

And the light, the only light that was ever real, 

was Him.