The Candle I Bought After Rent

Dear friend,

My rent cleared yesterday at 2:04pm. I had $31.47 left in my Chime account after it did. At 9:17pm I bought a $14 candle on the Trader Joe's app for pickup. Fig and tobacco. There was no reason.

So here is today's letter in one line. You are allowed to buy the thing that was only for you.

Nobody's permission comes with it except yours, and I am naming it out loud for both of us so neither of us pretends we did not notice.

The candle will be ready at the counter tomorrow at 10am. The $14 is in checking, not on a card. The $31 was already past rent, past the phone bill on the 15th, past the Shopify renewal, past the car insurance autopay on the 22nd. I ran the numbers twice before I touched it, because the first thing I did when I saw the $31 was ask myself what bill I had forgotten. There was no bill. Just $31 sitting there, after everything.

I almost moved it to savings. I almost sent it toward a card balance that already has a plan on it. I almost did the thing where you let the leftover become a chore. Then I bought the candle.

The $31 after rent is the money every scarcity sentence in this list grew up around. You can't spend it, it's not enough to matter. You can't save it, it's not enough to matter. Just hold it. That loop ends with the money gone and no record of what it did.

A $9 lunch, a $4 car wash app charge, two $6 coffees, a $7.49 small-batch bar on an Instagram ad at midnight. Twelve of those is the candle, four times over, and I can tell you now I will not remember what any of them were. The candle I will remember. It will sit on my counter when the next three bad days come. It smells like something expensive. $14 bought me a month of small evidence that I was not only the person who paid rent.

The candle is not a treat. A treat is what you call it when you need to apologize to yourself for buying it. $14 is not a treat, it is a line item. The line item is: one thing a month that I bought because I wanted it. The amount is small because small is what I have. The point is not the amount.

Last month the line item was a $9 nail polish called Hard Water. The month before, a $12 pair of socks with cats on them from a girl in my group chat's Etsy. Every one of them is still in the apartment. The $400 of groceries from September is gone. The $912 rent is gone. The three objects are still here. That is the ratio I did not understand for a long time.

I am not going to tell you to spend $14 today. I am not going to tell you to open your Chime and see what is left after October 1 cleared. That is the exact instruction that makes a person close the app instead.

Today you are allowed to look at the number without flinching. If there is $12 after rent, $12 is enough to be a line item of its own. If there is $4, $4 is still money you earned and did not spend yet. If there is nothing until the 15th, that is also a number, and you are allowed to see it without punishing yourself for seeing it.

The permission is not the purchase. The permission is the look. If a small object follows, let it. If it does not, nothing has failed. The candle I bought yesterday was not the point. The point was that I saw $31 and did not immediately solve it.

Rent cleared. The month started. Something you earned is still yours, in whatever amount it is. That is the whole permission for a Friday.

Keep the door open,

P.S. The Trader Joe's pickup slot said tomorrow 10am, which is the exact time my client said she'd Venmo me the second half of the invoice. I don't know yet whether the candle will end up paid for with the first half of her money or the second.