I'm fixing a candle, cultivating the stillest, most smokeless flame that can be obtained through a control of ambient air flow, and not breathing.  It is a beautiful, tall, slender thing hovering in the dark, floating upon the wick like the aura of a soul; unstirred, it looks inert.  My thoughtless movement, not even close-by, becomes a riot to the flame.  I learn to still and gentle the sphere of my gross influence in this tiny world, as I find this little touchless one more sensitive and sincere than many I have touched too much.  Indeed the flame loves me most intensely of all; it counts magnificent the mere movement of my breath. 

This single flame will have to go before I sleep.  Another may come another time, but this one's brief life will have been spent before bedtime comes, and spent entirely with me.  Its excitement at my approach, its twinning with my soul in stillness when I stay, our entrancement together—his light, my energy—will have to end.  And for one like me, who tabulates love only between the sheets, his extinguishment just as I go there will leave me sweetly sad, and though he could not stay, I will keep his light—like thousands before him, and thousands more to come—in my flickering heart.