The first time Clara lit a candle for her mother, the flame trembled as if it were unsure it should exist. She remembers the night clearly—wind rattling the windows of her small apartment, her hands shaking around the matchbook. Her mother had passed only a week before, and Clara had been stumbling through the silence of each day as though her voice and her heartbeat had been taken away with her.
She had found the candle in a drawer, tucked among old receipts and forgotten postcards. It was lavender, her mother’s favorite scent. Clara struck the match once, twice, until it caught, and then lowered it to the wick. The fire rose, bent with the draft from the window, then steadied.
She sat in front of it for hours. Every time the flame wavered, she feared it would go out. But it didn’t. She whispered stories to it—the kind she had once shared with her mother while cooking, while folding laundry, while walking down the long aisles of the grocery store. The candle listened.
One became many. Over the next months, Clara lit a candle for every memory she wanted to hold on to. One for her mother’s laughter when they couldn’t stop burning toast. One for her mother’s hands that smelled of flour and soap. One for the quiet afternoons they spent doing nothing at all, which somehow felt like everything.
There were nights the wind was strong, and the flames bent almost to breaking. Clara shielded them with her palms, the warmth of the fire against her skin feeling like a heartbeat pressed back into her. She learned to trim the wicks, to space the candles so their heat wouldn’t suffocate one another. What began as ritual became survival.
Her friends began to notice. At first, they came hesitantly, bringing their own small candles to add. One for a lost father. One for a sister gone too soon. One for a friend they still spoke to in dreams. Clara didn’t ask questions—she only made space on the table. Soon her home became a quiet gathering place, glowing with dozens of fragile lights that leaned together, refusing to die.
Years later, when Clara moved to a new city, she packed only a few essentials and a box filled with candles. The wax bore fingerprints, drips frozen mid-fall, wicks blackened but waiting. Each one carried a piece of the journey, a story kept alive in flame.
Clara never stopped lighting them. She never stopped watching them bend and sway in the wind, fragile but defiant. To her, each flicker said the same thing: We are still here. We are still burning.
And so, the candles in the wind became her way of holding on—not to what was lost, but to what refused to vanish. Lights that would not die, no matter how hard the world breathed against them.
