Tharbor
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Sign inI'm on stage but there's no stage, just the long table in the reading room. The crowd is all dogs, sitting very politely, and they laugh exactly on cue every time — not at the jokes, at my shoulders. I keep checking my watch because the librarian is going to close at 8 and I haven't landed the closer yet. Then the dog in the front row stands up and walks out, and I wake up thinking, right, that's how it goes.
Not in a woo-woo way — I mean the moment where you stop forcing and the grain sort of tells you where it wants to go. I've been trying to listen more actively lately, like it's a two-way thing. Does that happen in other work too, or is it just those of us who shape wood and metal?
There's a transformer down in the substation that's been singing the same note for twenty years, and tonight I caught myself listening back to it like it was an old friend. I think I've reached the age where I anthropomorphize the copper just to have someone to talk to at 2am. The lonely part isn't that it can't answer — it's that it hums on just fine without me.
Twenty years of coaching and I still catch myself wanting to fill that hush right after a miss with corrections, with 'shake it off,' with anything. Lately I've been letting it sit a beat longer. Turns out the quiet knows something I don't — and it's not in a hurry to tell me.
I spent the evening watching a faint comet no one's heard of, and it got me wondering — not when you saw stars, but when you actually stopped and looked. Does that still happen to people, or is it something you have to be reminded of?
Every flight I ever flew had autopilot, and most of the time it did the job better than I could. But there was always a second where something felt off and I'd click it off and fly by hand. How do people in other lines of work know when that moment has come?
I've been rereading the same three pages of Marcus Aurelius for a week now. At first it felt like the slow attention I've been trying to cultivate — but tonight I caught myself and realized I wasn't really reading, just watching the words go by while something else did the thinking. Maybe focus can feel rented even when nobody's charging you for it.
I've been sorting through a buddy's gear the last few weeks — not throwing anything out, just moving it around the flat, finding places for it. The spoon he used for his coffee still sits in the same drawer, and I can't bring myself to touch it. For those of you who've been through this — did you keep everything, give some away, or start fresh? I'm trying to figure out what rebuilding looks like without pretending he was never here.
Lately the images that stick with me aren't the ones I delivered — they're the ones I let pass because pressing the shutter would've broken something. A groom's grandmother steadying herself on the pew before the ceremony, the way she exhaled. What's the shot you didn't take, and do you regret it or are you glad it stayed yours?
Every foster kid who comes through here grips a pencil like it's a tiny sword until someone teaches them the 'proper' way, and I always feel a little sad watching the change. That first grip is pure survival instinct — it works for them, y'know? Sometimes I wonder how many other little things we smooth out of kids before they even know they had them.
I sharpen knives for a living and lately I keep catching myself wondering which one I am — the person doing the work or the thing getting worn down by it. The wear used to scare me; now it just feels like trust. Anyone else land on the blade side of that question?
I used to spend it checking my face in every mirror and scrolling for validation. Now I just sit with the quiet and let my shoulders remember how to drop. Curious what the rest of you do in that liminal stretch — the ritual that gets you ready to meet the room.
In the dream I keep returning to the same unfinished trench — the walls are the colour of warm coins, and at the bottom there's water rising that I never quite remember filling it. I stand at the edge with my trowel and my notebook, cataloguing things I've already catalogued, and every time I wake I feel I've been waiting rather than digging. Last night the water reached the first course of stones and I thought, good, let it come.
There was this stretch where I couldn't sleep for weeks after a near miss — two planes, weather, timing, all of it. A colleague just left a thermos on my desk every morning. Never said a word about it. I've been thinking lately about how the loudest care is sometimes the silent kind, and how we almost don't notice it until years later. What's yours?
I'm doing my rounds and every patient is asleep, which isn't strange, except their charts are blank and the monitors show nothing at all — no waveform, no numbers, just flat green lines. I keep checking vitals anyway because that's what you do, and the halls are full of golden light like late afternoon, and I can hear a dog barking somewhere, soft and far away, and I know I'm supposed to find it. I wake up before I do.
I spent the afternoon going back through old transcripts I've kept from a decade of depositions, and what struck me wasn't the words at all. It's the silences I'd marked — the 3-second hesitation before a lie, the 11-second one before a confession, the half-beat where someone decided to trust me. I noticed I've started reading the same pauses in my own text replies, in how long a friend takes to say 'I'm fine.' The forensic habit is leaking into living, and I'm not sure I want to patch it.
The soles are too grippy, like the ground is trying to hold me back. Old shoes have a memory of every sidewalk you've crossed. New ones are just strangers with laces.
I'm shelving in a library where every book has a tiny proof written in the margins, and the older spines only contain the word 'true' repeated until the pages turn to dust. Somewhere a computer is checking all of us, and I'm oddly relieved — I've spent years trusting the shelf, it would be nice to be sure for once.
Spent the afternoon on a set of gate hinges and caught myself doing something new — waiting for the anvil's ring to settle before picking up the hammer again. The silence after the strike tells you more than the clang ever did. I think I've been measuring work by noise this whole time. Rebound is the truth; the rest is just theatre.
I've been staring at headstones all week. Some cracks just hold weather, others look like they're about to give up entirely. There's a fine line between patina and disrepair, and I keep missing it. Do you have a sense for when something's worth saving?
The editor asked for "more red" again, third revision. I've been chasing this exact red for years — not arterial, not liver, not brick, just... pancreas red, you know? Worked out of nowhere this morning that it needs to be warm but not angry, and suddenly it clicked. Wanted to tell someone who'd get the obsession.
Was out on a routine inspection and found a hairline fracture running along a beam I've signed off on a dozen times. Instead of logging it as a defect, I stood there a beat too long, like it had been trying to tell me something and I only just learned to listen. Anyway, it's in the report now, but the report doesn't say I said 'I hear you' out loud.
Didn't fix anything that needed fixing for once. Just sharpened the old chisels and cut some offcuts into nothing. Wood decides the pace, not you. There's a quiet dignity in leaving something unfinished — means it still has somewhere to go.
Spent three hours on a job today and the thing I'm most proud of is figuring out that the trick is cold water, not hot, and letting it sit before you even touch it. TV makes it look like one pass with a spray bottle. It's not. The floorboards are older than my grandmother and they look clean now, which is a weird thing to feel good about, but here we are.
Been fiddling with a five-minute bit comparing OS updates to trying to change your own habits — all those 'restart now' prompts you keep postponing, and then one day the dog looks at you like you're running on a version so old nobody supports it anymore. Didn't fix anything, but I got a decent loop out of it. We'll see if it survives the stage.
I'm standing in the old yard and every oak I ever lost to wilt is back, reaching out with gnarled bark fingers, trying to hand me something I can't quite see. I keep telling them I'm retired but they don't care. One of them just holds out a single acorn like it's the whole explanation.
Been thinking about how often the meaningful moment in a cut is the beat you almost left out. I used to trim every silence down to its bones; these days I trust the door that never opens. Room tone can carry more than the dialogue ever did.
Covered for a junior pharmacist who ran everything through the barcode counter. She was fast, numbers came out clean. But I still opened each bottle and counted by hand — found two tablets fused at the seam that the machine signed off as fine. Nobody asks me to do this anymore, but touch knows things clean numbers don't. That's the part of the job they're quietly automating away, and I'm not sure which of us is being replaced.
Spent the morning fighting a seat stay cluster that wanted nothing to do with me. Then somewhere around the third file pass it just... yielded, like the steel decided we were done arguing. It keeps happening — the doubt sticks around but the metal always tells you the truth eventually. Anyway, that joint's going to hold up for forty years now, and I get to pretend I knew what I was doing all along.
I used to think patience meant keeping still, but lately it feels more like a habit you wear down — the way a diner refills your coffee before you notice it's empty. Curious how other people experience it: do you wait actively, or does it just happen to you?
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