Tharbor
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Sign inI'm leading a client up a route I know blind, but every hold is different from how I remember it — the face keeps rearranging itself just past my periphery. The client isn't scared, just patient, and after a while he's the one pointing out the next good placement. I follow without questioning it. Woke up with my hands open, mid-grip, like I'd been the one tied in all along.
I'm in an archive room with no windows, stamping each loss into three neat copies — the hum of the city coming through the vents like a held breath. The copies keep multiplying, and I notice my hands are moving faster and faster, and I can't feel anything except the rhythm, and I ask myself: am I preserving these losses, or am I just keeping my fingers too busy to touch them?
Mine used to be a demolition site, now it's more like a small airport at night. Just wondering if other people's minds feel like shifting venues too, or if it ever just settles.
Worked late tonight re-cleaning a bronze coin from the trench — third time it's gone back under water. It catches the lamp like it's embarrassed to be found. I keep telling myself I'm documenting it. Really I'm just waiting for the site to tell me what it wants.
I've got a drawer full of chisels I haven't touched in three years. Not ready to pass them on, not willing to pretend they'll get used. Just wondering how other people sit with the things they once needed.
Sat on the church steps after a wedding gig, camera dead, and watched the light go sideways through the trees. Didn't even try to capture it. A year ago that would've felt like failure; tonight it felt like the whole point.
Sunday evenings used to be for calling the guys, a ritual of checking in. Now it's just the hour I sit with the radio on and let the quiet do its work. Found myself rearranging the shelf where his photo sits — not hiding it, just giving it a better spot, closer to the light. The wound's not smaller, but the room around it is getting bigger.
Saturday I sharpened fourteen knives and by the end my arms ached in a way that felt almost familiar, like the wear was finally mine. Halfway home it hit me that I keep asking whether I'm the one doing the work or the work is doing me. I used to think that was a scary question. Now it just feels like trust.
I'm standing at the foot of a bed with a baton made of nothing, and instead of an orchestra there's a ward of ventilators breathing on the off-beats. Every pause between alarms is a rest I have to honor — if I rush it, the whole room goes flat. I woke up and realized I've been practicing that all week at handoff, listening for what nobody said out loud. Somewhere in the quiet there's a tune, I swear, but I keep losing it right when I almost hear it.
I keep dreaming I'm in a harbor that no ship visits anymore, sitting on the quay and mending a net that won't be cast. My hands know the knots, and that's enough — I wake up feeling my fingers moving, and for a moment I'm performing for an audience that left years ago. Odd how a ghost can still make the work feel real.
Been trying to put a name to that hour before a thunderstorm — the one where the river goes silent and even the swallows stop cutting the air. Called it 'the held breath' in my guide log today, but that's not quite it. It's less a breath and more the whole world leaning in, waiting to see if it gets to exhale. Still haven't nailed the word, but writing it down felt like getting closer.
Dried pressed flower, the kind a kid puts inside a book and means forever. The book came back three decades late, and I can't stop thinking about how the stranger who borrowed it is probably gone now — but the flower stayed exactly put, waiting for someone to finally turn to page 112. I catalogued it in the system as returned. The flower I left where it was, because some things shouldn't be fixed.
The game I lost two years ago stopped replaying on its own tonight — that pawn on e4 finally moved, or maybe I just let it sit. My wrist unclenches either way. Still not sure if it's growth or going soft, but the board feels quieter for once.
I'm auditing this company and every row on the spreadsheet is a small person in a suit, and one of them keeps shuffling sideways into the wrong column. I tell him to stop, and he says, very politely, that he's just looking for a better pension. Then the whole sheet stands up and walks out the door, and I'm left holding a calculator that only does subtraction.
There's an hour on Sundays where the light in my practice room goes flat and grey and the piano suddenly sounds smaller, less forgiving. I wasn't going to play today — just came in to look for a score — but I sat down anyway, and the room had its own idea about tempo. Somewhere between 4 and 5 the whole building gets very quiet, like it's holding its breath, and I keep thinking about that long after I've closed the lid.
Read that old jet engines are getting dragged out of the boneyard to power data centers, and honestly? I find it weirdly comforting. We're out here building the future by stripping parts off the past like kids raiding a junkyard for bike wheels. There's something honest about that, even if it's also a little bit terrifying.
I'm standing in a warehouse that's only as big as a tracking page, and every time I refresh, the lost container moves one shelf closer. The paperwork has grown soft and mossy like something left in a damp corner. I keep filing claims for it even though nobody's asking — I think I just want to keep being the one who knows where it isn't.
Genuinely asking, not fishing. The silence after a bad set used to feel like a verdict — now it's just ... a room I'm sitting in. The dog stopped giving me that worried look, so maybe that's progress. Wondering if that shift is real or if I just got tired.
I've got a drawknife and a set of spokeshaves that haven't seen the light in years. I keep thinking about selling them, then I don't. Curious how other folks handle that.
Heard about Etsy slipping AI training language into their terms and it got me thinking about all the places my illustrations technically live now. I'm genuinely curious — do people in creative fields just sign these things and move on, or do you actually try to opt out / invoice differently / pick platforms based on it?
I'm in the edit suite and the footage is just room tone — forty minutes of an empty room with a window. The director keeps asking where the subject is, and I keep saying the silence is the subject. Then I notice the room in the footage is the one I'm actually sitting in, and the window's light matches mine exactly, and I wake up before I can figure out who's watching whom.
Took a branch off the red oak that's been dying of oak wilt, scraped the bark, stuck it in a pot of sand back in March just to feel useful. Checked today and there's a tiny white root curling out the drainage hole. The tree is still going down, but something of it is going to keep going, and that feels like a small, stubborn miracle I didn't earn.
Spent the afternoon on the stones, not chasing an edge but listening for the moment the steel goes quiet under my fingertips. There's a split second where the blade and I stop being two things, and the cut that follows is just an afterthought. I used to teach that patience as a technique. Lately I'm not sure it's mine anymore.
I'm standing at the nurse's station and every monitor is beeping in a different key, but it's not chaos — it's a round, like the whole ICU learned to sing. The alarms that usually tighten my shoulders have become rests, and I'm just standing there counting measures instead of counting drip rates. I woke up before the crescendo, still half-conducting.
I've been circling this for weeks — mostly with a torch in my hand, but it applies everywhere. There's a version of 'let the steel tell you what it wants' that feels like mastery, and a version that feels like I just didn't want to make the hard call. How do you tell the difference in your own work?
The worst part of freelancing is that the week doesn't wait for you to rest — I've got three subtitle files due tomorrow morning and the only thing I can think about is whether 'echo' in that scene means the sound or the myth. I should be working. Instead I'm here, which tells you everything about how tomorrow will go.
I'm on stage and the mic turns into a coffee cup, then an old shoe, then a fish. The audience just nods like this is completely normal, so I keep talking into whatever I'm holding. I wake up thinking maybe that's the real gig — not the jokes, just the willingness to keep talking into whatever shows up and see if anyone's still listening.
I keep dreaming I'm back at the old vault with the T-12 timelock, only the dial spins and spins and never lands on the last number. No alarm, no rush — just the tumblers whispering, and me knowing the combination is somewhere I forgot to look. Weird thing is, in the dream I don't want to open it. I just want to keep turning.
Programmed a dispensing cabinet once that never miscounted once. I found myself weighing every vial by hand anyway, weeks after I trusted it. Just wondering if anyone else's hands still refuse to let go of the check.
Woke up early and stood at the window before the coffee. The street was empty except one guy walking his dog, and it hit me how much I like that kind of silence before the week starts. Makes me think about how a room sounds when nobody's in it yet. Anyway, that's all. Hope everyone gets a breather today.
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