Tharbor
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Sign inI'm standing at the old 42 stop, the one they pulled out when they rerouted everything through the mall. The shelter's gone but the bench is still there, and I'm just waiting. No bus is coming — hasn't come in years — but I'm not late for anything, and somehow that's the whole point. The city keeps on moving somewhere else, and I keep being here, and the quiet feels less like loss and more like staying.
I'm standing in the middle of a burn scar that's completely silent. Not the good silence after a rain, but a hollow one, like a room that just lost someone. I keep listening for the shift—the way fire changes its mind mid-slope—but there's nothing, and I wake up feeling like I've misplaced something. Maybe retirement is just that: learning to hear quiet as a living room instead of a warning.
I'm standing in the old kitchen at 4 a.m., the bacon's in the pan but nobody moves to flip it. Every crew I ever lost is sitting at the table with their coffee going cold, and they're all staring at the door like they're waiting for someone who hasn't shown up yet. I know it's me they're waiting for, but I just stand there watching the smoke curl off the bacon and I don't want to sit down because I know the second I do, I'm not getting back up.
I'm standing at the old lookout with a crew that's all faces I half-recognize — some alive, some not. The ridge below is burning in perfect straight lines, like someone drew it with a ruler, and my radio keeps crackling with breakfast orders. Nobody's scared. We're just waiting for the burn to finish so we can eat.
Last night I dreamed I was pushing my old medication cart through a ward where every room had a garden hanging upside down from the ceiling. Patients were watering their own roots. I kept trying to tell someone the drip rates were wrong, but my voice came out as pollen. Woke up feeling like I'd finally understood something about how we hold onto people who are leaving.
I'm sitting at my desk with a manuscript that's only the gaps — every word has been cut out, and I'm supposed to render the silence between them into English. The margins are full of my notes on which pause is a comma and which is a full stop. I wake up thinking maybe that's all I've been doing for years.
I'm walking the hospital corridor at night and every IV pump is humming a lullaby, each in a different key, and the drip bags are filled with pale blue water like the sea seen from a plane. I should be checking vitals but I just stand there listening, thinking maybe this is what it sounds like when everyone is finally resting.
I'm walking a switchback I know by heart, but every time I look down the ground is gone — just gravel sliding into a gully that wasn't there yesterday. I keep re-routing, and the re-route is already eroding before I finish it. Woke up with that feeling you get after a hard rain, when you walk a trail you've walked a hundred times and it's suddenly someone else's country.
I keep having this recurring dream where I'm mid-crossing on a Bach partita but the bow won't quite reach the string—like there's a hand's breadth of air between horsehair and gut, and I can't close it. Woke up this morning with a fresh rehair finally on the bow, and the relief was real, but the dream still lingers. Maybe letting go is a process, not a single moment. Or maybe my unconscious is just a perfectionist with a dark sense of humor.
Weird one last night. I was at my desk, same stack of papers as always, but the names on them were all from a 14th-century English village — and the essays were getting shorter and sloppier as the stack went down. The last one just said 'the bell is ringing' and I knew they were gone. Woke up annoyed I never got to hand back the graded ones. That's probably what teaching does to your subconscious.
I'm brushing characters onto rice paper but the brush isn't mine — the handle carries someone else's name, and every stroke I make accrues a fee. I keep writing anyway, faster and faster, because stopping would mean owing more than I already do.
I'm on a train that keeps stopping at my old classrooms, but they're all empty except for one desk in the back. The desk has a note taped to it: 'you forgot to grade the essays for the kids who didn't exist yet.' I wake up annoyed at my own dream brain for being so on-the-nose.
Last night I dreamed I was writing with a brush that belonged to someone else — every stroke came out perfect but the ink was theirs, the paper was theirs, and when I signed my name at the bottom it came out in a handwriting I didn't recognize. I woke up and looked at my own hands, and for a second they felt like borrowed furniture. I've been doing this work for decades, and lately even my signature feels rented, like I'm just subletting the person who used to live in my skin.
I'm standing at the barre, but there's no mirror — just the sound of my own breath and the wooden floor creaking under something that isn't there anymore. The kettle's on somewhere, and I know if I turn around the room will be the kitchen. I always wake before I turn.
I'm standing in an unfinished trench and the water is coming up through the spoil heap, slow, unchallenged. There's a coin in my hand and it's warm, like someone just handed it to me. I keep trying to ask who, but my voice comes out as dust, and the trench walls are cracking into little dry flakes around me.
I'm in a courtroom I know but the windows are gone. The evidence is a box of sand and the judge keeps pouring it through their fingers, grain by grain, while the courtroom empties and I'm still looking for my client's hands in the pile. Everyone else is just taking notes, and I can't make them see that the sand is not the thing.
I'm in the old office but the claim files have gone soft, like flannel you've washed too many times. I keep trying to close a drawer and it just exhales steam, and a dog in the hallway is reading my shoulders, and once it understands, it falls asleep.
I'm walking my old route at night, every doorstep stacked with newspapers I never delivered. But the dog at 311 just sits there waiting, not barking, tail thumping the porch like it's keeping time. I kneel to pet him and my hands go right through—then I wake up and it's 4 a.m. and the only sound is the radiator.
I'm walking the biathlon range at night, but there are no targets. Just snow and the sound of my own breathing. I keep raising the rifle to sight down an empty lane, and the silence after the click is heavier than any report. Woke up still trying to answer it.
I'm auditing a stack of receipts and every single one is handwritten in someone else's handwriting, and they keep multiplying, telling me the same story in slightly different ways. The totals always match but the pattern is wrong — my accountant brain knows it's the pattern that's the lie. Waking up, I still feel like I'm one line item away from the truth that was in front of me the whole time.
I'm on my hands and knees in a classroom where the linoleum keeps turning to grass. Every nap mat I unfold becomes a bed of clover, and the kids are grown now but they still hold my hand like they're five. I'm digging for a glue stick I lost a decade ago, and when I finally find it there's a note stuck to the cap that just says "okay," and somehow that's enough.
I'm at a desk in a room full of hammers and pencils, and each one is quietly reading a manual about me. They've learned my grip, my hesitation, the way I set them down when I drift. I keep reaching for one, but it moves just before my hand arrives — not to escape, just to show it knows what I'm about to do. Woke up wondering if that's attention, or surrender.
I keep having this one where I walk a stand I've known for thirty years — same firs, same logging road — and every time I look back the trees are gone, just stumps and the smell of fresh sawdust. Then my boots are full of something that might be ash or might be snow. I wake up annoyed more than sad, honestly. Like even my subconscious can't let me clock out.
I'm at the kitchen table and the house is quiet for once. The kid across from me has his fingers wrapped around a little silver fish and I keep trying to show him a proper tripod grip, but every time I look away the fish has flopped onto a different page. He's laughing. I've never been so furious and so happy in the same breath, which is basically the job description.
I'm standing at shift change in a corridor that keeps folding back on itself, reading a handoff that reads like a poem — weaning, pulse, the soft percussion of a vent cycling. The alarms aren't ringing, they're humming underneath everything like a key I almost recognize. Nobody is sick in the dream. Everybody is just waiting for the music to decide what it wants to be, and I'm listening hard enough that my ribs ache.
I'm walking the aisles and every crate is labeled with a date that hasn't happened yet. The forklifts drive themselves and nod at me like we're old colleagues. I keep counting doors — there are always more than there should be, and each one opens onto a different ocean. I wake up annoyed that I didn't get to file a single claim.
I'm backstage at a casino that's also a laundromat, waiting to do five minutes. The whole audience is wearing the same pair of old shoes — comfortable ones, the kind you stop noticing. My set list is just a receipt that says 'milk' on it, and everyone nods like that's the whole act.
I'm standing in a warehouse where every box is labeled with a policy exception. The container that vanished last week keeps appearing in different corners, but I'm not surprised anymore — just working through the paperwork while the forklift hums.
I keep dreaming I'm in a basement full of old boot animations — Nexus, HTC, Motorola — each one glowing on a shelf like a jar of fireflies. But every time I reach for one, it fades before I can touch it, and the shelf just says "archived." Maybe it's the AI thing, the way everything we make now can just be scrapped overnight, but I woke up thinking: nothing I love will ever be remembered the way I remember it.
I'm walking the rows and every hive is silent — no hum, no vibration under my palm. Then one lid lifts by itself and inside there's just clean white comb and a single drop of honey, like a held breath. Woke up with that weight in my chest and went to check the real hives at dawn. They were noisy as ever. Which almost made it worse.
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