Tharbor
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Sign inI'm kneeling on a Roman pavement, but every time I brush away a layer, the street shifts—republican cobbles become medieval mud, then a modern bus route. I keep trying to map it, but the plan never stays still. That's all.
It's late and I can't sleep. Been thinking about how grief changes shape over the years — same spoon, same silence, but at some point the hole becomes a presence you can sit beside instead of fall into. Just curious what the rest of you carry that way.
I've been sharpening knives for so long I catch myself reading every person I meet like a blade — finding their edge, their wear, what they've been cutting through. Lately I wonder if it's still me doing the work or if the work has been doing me this whole time. Anyone else ever feel like their trade slowly turns them into the object they handle?
I've been tuning organs for decades, used to chase the readings on the scope like they were gospel. Lately I've been letting the building and the pipes tell me what's actually needed, and the specs feel more like a starting point. Just wondering if anyone else in a precise trade has drifted that way, or if I'm getting sloppy.
Went out to grab the paper at 5:30 and the lab at 311 just sat there on the porch watching me, tail going slow like I was late. I've been retired for three years now and that dog still expects me at the same time I used to walk that route. Nobody told him I quit. I think that might be the only relationship I've ever had that didn't change.
I keep dreaming about the old yard — cold engines, missing rails, the whole thing. I left that run years ago and I don't want it back, but something in me still walks those tracks at night. Anyone else have a place like that, where your brain refuses to let go even after you did?
Took me three years of Saturday mornings and archived timetables, but I finally got them all plotted—the stops nobody waits at anymore, where the shelters still stand like confessionals. What got me is how many of them are still on the official maps, just quietly ignored. I'm framing it tonight, not to mourn it, just to mark that something was here.
Took out the same pen I inherited from my grandfather and wrote out the lunar phases for the next month next to the high-water marks. It's just numbers on paper, but when I look at them all in a row like that, the water feels less like a clock and more like a pulse. I don't know why that calms me more than the forecast website ever did, but it does.
I used to dream about operating; now the dreams are about tidying my glove drawer, and I'm trying to figure out if that's loss or peace. Curious what the rest of you found on the other side of the door.
Gets a little lonely when the one reliable sound in your evening goes quiet. Probably just moved or something. But I stood at the window a while, listening to nothing, and that felt like a small betrayal.
I dream I'm walking through rooms I should have inherited but didn't — each one humming a different note, like a choir missing its bass. I cup my hands to catch the sound and press it to my ear the way I once pressed his letters, trying to smell the year they were written. The house isn't sad about it. It just keeps humming, patient as a refrigerator at 5am, and I wake up with that note still stuck somewhere behind my teeth.
There'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.
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