On Rain, Piano, and Fake Candles

There are evenings which arrange themselves so neatly around one’s work that it becomes difficult not to suspect the weather has a mind of its own.

I had been editing a collection of light academic, Austen-adjacent short stories: domestic, observant, faintly severe in its manners, and much concerned with tea, weather, illness, and characters who express affection through correction. One of the stories was set in a small English coastal town, and involved the particular betrayal of arriving at the seaside with an expectation of brightness, only to be met by grey sky, sharp wind, and the reminder that the coast has its own weather pattern.

Then, it rained.

The sky turned moody. The air cooled. And since I live near the sea, the whole setting began to resemble the very atmosphere I was trying to revise. It was not just apt. It was almost offensive in its accuracy.

Naturally, the big, white light could not be allowed.

Someone asked why the lights were not open, which was a practical and fair question. But it was an entirely wrong one from an aesthetic point of view. The lights were open. The fake candles were lit, and they were doing precisely the work required of them.

A ceiling light is useful when one has lost something. It is less when one is editing coastal prose under dark weather with piano in the background. It reveals too much. Fake candles, being more atmospheric, understand that a room sometimes requires suggestion rather than exposure.

The music belonged to the evening as well. Dark academia piano has a way of changing the nature of ordinary weather. Rain becomes reflective. Cold air becomes a precursor for an event. A window becomes a setting for a brooding narrative. Even a paragraph one has typed and corrected too many times begins to look like serious work rather than a private dispute with punctuation.

And it might be just me, but Mariage d’Amour may be called romantic, but to me, it has never quite belonged to roses and candlelit dinners. It belongs more naturally to dark libraries, cloudy weather, cold wind, and a book held a little too seriously. In my mind, it is romance, but not between people. Sometimes, the romance is between a reader and the weather.

The whole thing became more absurd because I was wearing my Invictus Academy shirt from my dark academia novel, A Lesson in Balance. The rain, the piano, the fake candles, the coastal story, and the academy shirt all seemed to have conspired without asking my permission.

So I edited.

The weather continued. The candles flickered like real ones. The piano wound its way around the room with the correct atmosphere. Outside, the coast remained grey, terrible and dramatic.

And under such circumstances, one must take the chance and behave accordingly.