THREE FLAMES

She lights the candle before I’ve even finished my coffee.

I watch her do it—pull the match, touch it to the wick, shake it out—without once looking at what she’s doing. Like breathing. Like something so automatic it doesn’t require attention.

Vanilla-scented. The label says something about self-care or serenity. One of those words that didn’t used to need saying.

She sets it on the table between us and goes back to her laptop. Doesn’t glance at it again. The flame just burns there, unwatched, doing nothing.

“What’s that for?” I ask.

She looks up. Confused, like I’ve asked why she’s wearing shoes. “Hmm?”

“The candle.”

“Oh.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. Just… vibes?”

The word lands strange. Vibes. Not light. Not heat. Not work. Just existing. Just being lit because being lit feels better than not being lit.

I almost tell her she’s wasting it, but I catch myself. She’s twenty-three. Lives alone in the city, works remotely for some startup I don’t fully understand. She can waste her own candles if she wants.

“How’s the project going?” I ask instead.

“Which one?”

“The one you were telling me about last week. The… community thing?”

She brightens. “Oh, the wellness collective? It’s good. We’re launching next month. We’ve got like forty people signed up already. My friend Sarah—she just quit her consulting job after a panic attack in the office bathroom—she’s the one who convinced me we needed this.”

“And what is it exactly? Remind me.”

She shifts in her chair, the way she does when she’s trying to explain her generation’s language to mine. “It’s a space for people to process burnout. Like, structured rest. We do guided meditations, group workshops on boundary-setting. The whole framework is around radical rest as resistance.”

I must make a face, because she stops.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You think it’s stupid.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” She leans back, arms crossed. “Go ahead. Say it.”

Radical rest as resistance. The words sit in my throat like something sour. My grandfather studied by stolen candlelight. I walked two miles to school in winter and saved lunch money for months to buy programming books from the capital. And she’s resisting… by resting.

But I don’t say that. Instead, I say: “I just wonder if your generation understands what real struggle looks like.”

There it is. Out in the open.

She doesn’t flinch. “You mean because we have it easy?”

“I mean because when everything comes easy, you don’t develop—” I stop myself.

“Resilience?” she finishes. “That’s what you were going to say.”

The candle flickers between us. Vanilla fills the silence.

“My grandfather,” I say slowly, “would have given anything for an easy life. For a life where he didn’t have to choose between eating and learning. Where light wasn’t something you stole.”

“Okay,” she says. “So, tell me about him.”

It’s not a request. It’s a challenge.

Fine. If she wants to know what real effort looks like, I’ll show her.

The match flared in darkness—a tiny sun between his fingers.

He cupped it, shielding the light from the crack beneath the attic door. If his father saw light upstairs after dark, there’d be questions. Questions led to discoveries, and discoveries meant the shop tomorrow instead of school. Maybe the next day too. Maybe until the boy forgot he’d ever wanted anything else.

The candle stub was small. Maybe three inches of tallow, stolen from his mother’s kitchen drawer that morning while she kneaded bread. She’d notice it missing when she went to light the stove at dawn. He’d deal with that then. For now, he had an hour. Maybe less.

He touched the match to the wick and waited. The wax around the base had melted and rehardened so many times it looked like frozen tears. The flame caught. Steadied. Bent slightly in the draft from the roof tiles.

From downstairs came his father’s voice—something about coffee prices, the neighbor’s debt, words blurred by exhaustion and distance. Then his mother’s voice, sharp and sudden. The crash of pottery. His father’s anger redirecting.

The boy exhaled. She’d done it again.

He pulled the book closer. Mathematics. The letters swam in the weak light. He had forty-three pages left before Wednesday’s exam. His fingers were still sticky from honey jars, wrists aching from lifting flour sacks all afternoon—working at his father’s shop after school.

He read. The flame shortened. His eyes burned.

When footsteps scraped on the stairs below, he pinched the wick between wet fingers. The darkness came back all at once. He held his breath, book clutched to his chest, and waited.

The footsteps passed. Kept going to his parents’ room.

He didn’t relight the candle. The stub was too short now anyway. He’d used it up.

But he sat in the dark for a long time, the book still pressed against his ribs, and pictured tomorrow’s match. Tomorrow’s stolen stub. Tomorrow’s forty-three pages.

That’s how it went for years.

His father wanted him in the shop. His mother kneaded bread in silence every morning, teaching him patience in the rhythm of her hands—fold, press, wait, fold—while his father slept off the previous night. The way she counted the folds—fifteen for daily bread—taught him numbers before school did.

He graduated from elementary school—sixth grade was the goal then, the finish line for boys like him—and took a teaching position in a remote village two days’ ride from home. Made almost nothing. Studied at night, by candle again, this time his own candles, bought with his own money, still hoarded like they were precious.

He became a lawyer. Eventually, he headed housing assistance programs, building homes for people who couldn’t otherwise afford them.

The boy who studied by stolen light became a man who created light for others.

I finish the story and look at my granddaughter.

She’s quiet for a moment. Then: “That’s incredible. Really. But he had to do that. To survive. I don’t. So, what does that prove about me?”

The question catches me off guard. “It proves that ease doesn’t build character. That when everything comes easy—”

“I should make my life harder? Create fake struggle so I can feel worthy?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what are you saying?”

I don’t have an answer that doesn’t sound like judgment.

She leans forward. “Did you have to do that? Steal candles and hide in attics?”

“No,” I admit. “But I had my own—”

“So, tell me yours.”

I was sixteen when I saved enough lunch money to take the bus to the capital.

Six months of eating half portions, of telling my mother I wasn’t hungry when she offered seconds, of hoarding coins in a jar under my bed. Not because we were starving—my father had steady work by then, we had electricity, we had enough. But because I wanted something I couldn’t name yet.

The bookstore was in a part of the city I’d never been. Modern. Clean. The clerk looked at me like I’d wandered in from another century when I asked if they carried books on computer programming.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

I didn’t, not really. I’d read an article about graphics, about games you could play on screens, about code that made pixels move. I wanted to make something like that. Something from nothing. Something that existed only because I’d imagined it.

“I’m learning,” I told him.

He sold me two books. They cost three months of saved money. I carried them home on the bus, wrapped in brown paper, and didn’t tell anyone what I’d bought.

That night, I lit a candle.

Not because I needed to—we had a bulb hanging from the ceiling, bright enough to read by. But I lit one anyway. Placed it on the table beside the books. Stared at the flame while I tried to make sense of the first chapter.

The candle made me sit straighter. Made the work feel serious. Made me remember my grandfather cupping fire in the dark, counting pages.

I lit a candle every night I studied after that. It became ritual. Proof that I was honoring what he’d sacrificed. That I wasn’t wasting the ease I’d inherited.

I worked on my father’s ten-year-old computer, one he’d brought home from a salvage shop. My mother brought tea sometimes and set it beside me without speaking. Sometimes she’d sit in the other chair, mending clothes or just sitting. Not helping—she wouldn’t have known how. But there. Present.

When I stayed up until two in the morning trying to make my first game work—debugging code that made no sense, convinced I’d wasted all that money on something I was too stupid to understand—she’d appear in the doorway with more tea.

“Still working?”

“It’s not working.”

“It will.”

How did she know? She couldn’t even read the code.

The night the game finally worked—a red Fiat navigating Damascus streets in wireframe 3D, the first racing game that looked like home—I called her over.

She looked at it for maybe ten seconds. Smiled. Said: “Good. Now come eat.”

I became an engineer. Worked for big tech companies. Built things that millions of people used.

The boy who saved lunch money for books became a man who could buy any book he wanted.

“See?” I say to my granddaughter. “I chose that struggle. No one made me. I could have taken the easy path. But I wanted to contribute. To make something. To—”

“And what about your mom?” she interrupts.

I stop.

“What?”

“Your mom. You said she brought tea. Sat with you. What was her contribution?”

I hesitate. “She worked hard. Kept the house. Raised us—”

“So, she just… existed? While you became an engineer?”

“It wasn’t like that. She supported—”

“Supported how? Specifically.”

I start to answer. Stop. Start again.

Because in my framework—the one I’ve been defending this whole conversation—I can’t name what she did that counted. She didn’t produce. Didn’t earn. Didn’t transform her circumstances through effort.

She just… was there.

The candle burns between us.

My granddaughter waits.

And I realize I’ve forgotten something.

My mother didn’t just bring tea.

She brought certainty.

When I told her I wanted to order programming books—books that cost three months of lunch money, about a skill no one in our town had, to make something that might never work—she didn’t ask if I was sure. Didn’t warn me about wasting money.

She asked: “How many books?”

Like it was already decided. Like my trying was inevitable. Like she’d been waiting for me to see what she already saw.

When the books arrived and sat on our table for three days before I opened them—when I was terrified I’d made a mistake, that I wasn’t smart enough, that I’d wasted everything—she didn’t give speeches.

She moved them closer to my chair. Poured tea. Sat across from me with her mending.

Her being there meant: Of course you can. I already know.

And my great-great-grandmother—

The image comes sudden and clear, something my grandfather told me once that I’d forgotten until now.

She kneaded bread every morning before dawn. Her hands teaching his hands—fold, press, wait, fold. He learned patience before mathematics. Learned rhythm before reading.

But more than that.

The dropped plate. The spilled tea. I’d heard the story but never understood it until now. She wasn’t clumsy. She was creating space. Space that cost her something. Space that made his defiance possible.

She took the yelling. Took the anger meant for him.

So he could hide the book. Pinch the flame. Breathe.

I look at my granddaughter.

“They didn’t contribute by producing,” I say slowly. “They contributed by believing—before we believed in ourselves.”

She doesn’t respond.

“My great-great-grandmother made my grandfather think he was more than the shop. My mother made me think I could learn something no one in our town understood.”

My granddaughter’s laptop chimes. She glances at it. Types something quick.

I see the message before she closes the screen:

Hey Sarah. I know you’re going through it. Want to talk? Or I can just sit with you while you figure stuff out. No pressure.

She closes the laptop. Looks at me.

“What?”

I almost tell her: That’s exactly what they did.

Instead, I say: “Tell me more about your project. The wellness thing. I want to understand it.”

She’s surprised. Suspicious.

“You actually want to know?”

I nod.

She shifts forward, hesitant at first, then warming.

“People are burning out. Like, actual collapse. And everyone just says ‘work harder, be resilient, push through.’ But what if resilience isn’t pushing through? What if it’s knowing when to stop? Knowing you’re allowed to need help? That rest isn’t something you earn—it’s something you need to function?”

She’s not talking about herself, I realize. She’s talking about her friends. Her generation. The people signing up for her collective.

“We’re teaching people they’re enough before they prove it,” she continues. “That they don’t have to justify their existence through productivity. That being here, being present—that’s contribution too.”

I listen. Really listen. Ask questions that aren’t challenges.

The candle burns down to nothing while we talk.

When the flame finally dies, she reaches for another candle. Different scent this time. Lights it without thinking.

“For vibes?” I ask.

She smiles. “For us.”

The match flares between her fingers—easy, certain, unguarded—and I see my grandfather’s hands cup a stolen flame in an attic eighty years ago. I see my mother’s hands set tea beside a keyboard. I see what I almost missed.

“Tell me more about your collective,” I say.