Watching the Light Go Out

I sketched the above piece with pen on a sticky note while sitting at my desk in my dorm on the eighth floor of Dykstra Hall sometime during Winter 2024.  I was doing homework, but I was struck with an idea.  I didn’t have enough time to make a full sketch, so I just took a Post-It note and a pen and blotted down what I could before the vision faded.  I do not exactly remember the whole thinking process behind it, but on the surface level, this piece is a drooping eye watching a candle melt.

On the deeper level, candles are lights used to see in the dark.  In our own darkest hours, there can be a person, or group of people, who makes things feel brighter.  Your woes and ailments all seem so much smaller.  You can’t imagine going back to your life without such a person.  However… things change between you two, and your feelings toward this person change too.  As much as you like them and want to like them, there is a distance growing slowly between the two of you.  This person once meant so much to you, and now you are becoming increasingly indifferent to them.  There is nothing that you can do, so you just watch yourself drift away.  Now you go back to being alone in the dark but this time without all the fear and panic.  It’s just you, going about your day after day after day.  Life feels hollow, like putting a dream back on the shelf.  It’s like working a 9-5 in an office five days a week, and suddenly you get sent to the fantasy world you’ve dreamed of.  Only to be returned to your 9-5.  You got the experiences you wanted but must silently accept that they are no more.

That is what this sketch is about.  It is about that moment right before the brightest light of your life goes out, and you can only watch.