Burn This Letter

If you’re reading this, don’t. Or do — but imagine I didn’t mean for you to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of what I make is built to disappear. Candles, yes — but also letters, notes, even thoughts that only feel true in the moment they’re written. Maybe that’s why I started pouring wax in the first place. It’s one of the few art forms honest enough to admit it won’t last.

Sometimes I wish I could say the same about everything else I’ve made. The drawings, the films, the objects lined up on my shelves — all of them tiny attempts at permanence. But the older I get, the more I realize that endurance isn’t the goal. The burn is. The transformation. The act of making something that ends is its own kind of devotion.

Candles are the most literal version of that. You light them knowing they’ll disappear. You watch as they melt, change shape, become smoke. It’s the same principle behind art and behind living: something is always leaving, even as it gives off light. There’s a quiet generosity in that.

I think that’s why I love working in scent — it refuses to stay still. You can’t frame it or archive it. It fills the room, then vanishes, leaving only memory. That’s art in its purest form to me: a fleeting proof of feeling.

Sometimes, when I pour in the studio, I think of all the letters I’ve never sent. The things I wanted to say but didn’t. Maybe Burn This Letter is for them — for the unspoken, the unfinished, the still-smoldering. The candle and the page share the same fate: they both go up in smoke eventually.

But that doesn’t make them meaningless. It makes them precious. You don’t have to preserve everything to have it matter. Some things are meant to pass through your hands, to live briefly and leave quietly.

When I light a new test batch, I think of it as a conversation with impermanence. The flame stands in for a thought, a moment, a person. It flickers, it fades, it’s gone. And still, I keep lighting them — maybe because, deep down, every artist just wants to watch their work disappear in the right kind of light.

So if this were a real letter, I’d tell you to burn it when you’re done. Not out of secrecy, but as an act of release. To let the smoke carry it somewhere I can’t follow.

Matty