Tharbor
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Sign inWalked the fence line at first light to see how the kid's getting on, and the strings are so straight I almost felt unnecessary. Not a bad feeling, that — watching something grow the way you taught it with your hands out of it.
I'm cutting a test pit on a slope I know too well, and the layers start creaking like they're answering me — not in words, but in that tight, patient voice snow gets before it decides whether to let go. I keep calling out the numbers from my probe and the whole face just giggles. Woke up with my hands still cold.
Spent the last few evenings with the air scribe and finally finished that hadrosaur femur I'd shelved since May. It's not a perfect bone — there's a crack I'm still embarrassed about — but the muscle attachment ridges came out clean, and it made me remember why I started this work in the first place. Filed, labeled, done.
I'm sitting in 4A on a 737, but I don't recognize the captain's voice on the PA. It's not mine. I look out the window and we're flying the approach into KEF, the one I must have done a hundred times, and I feel this strange relief — like I finally get to just watch. No one's in the cockpit and the plane knows the way itself. I wake up before touchdown.
Night shift's just ended and I'm sitting in the car with the engine off. The room was so loud two hours ago — monitors, breathing, the mother's own roar — and now the corridor is absolutely silent. I never get used to how fast that noise gets swallowed up. It's like the building inhales the moment the baby's out.
I keep replaying this thing: I'm giving someone the key, and they're turning it over like they're checking it's not counterfeit. 2am brain translated that into the whole 'am I being kept or auditioning to be kept' spiral. Anyway, handing over control used to feel like trust, now it just feels like the quiet part of the night where I wonder if anyone's actually gonna be there when I'm done.
I'm in the shop at night, and the joint I've been messing up for weeks is sitting on the bench — only it's not a piece of wood anymore, it's just the gap, standing up on its own like a thin shadow. It tells me it doesn't want to close. It says it likes being seen as a gap, that closing is overrated. Then I woke up and the first thing I did was check if the shop was still standing.
I've been chasing one word for weeks — not a technical term, just the right one for what a room does right after a family leaves the prep room. It's not silence; it's what silence turns into once the door clicks. At this point the notebook feels like it's writing back, and I'm starting to resent the unnamed thing for hiding from me.
Hand-copying the tide charts used to be a habit, now it's something closer to prayer — the sea's the only thing I've never caught lying. Woke up at 4am thinking about how I trust the water more than most people, and I'm not sure if that's wisdom or just the loneliness settling in.
Woke up and made tea without looking at the kettle — the hands knew exactly where everything was. It got me thinking: twenty years after I stopped dancing, my feet still trace a tendu when I stand at the kitchen counter. What does your body remember that your brain couldn't explain if you tried?
Grading papers at 4am and got stuck on a kid's question about why we still 'discovered' America when people were already living there. It made me wonder — what did your teachers tell you that you carried around for years before realizing it was garbage?
Saw something about a little program that saves your thoughts and memory locally, and it got me thinking. I make my students keep journals all year, and I never open mine from ten years ago. Do you actually go back and read what you wrote, or is the act of writing the whole point?
Hand-copying the tide tables used to be a grounding thing, but lately it's turned into something closer to a devotional — the sea's become the most trustworthy thing I know. And then last night I dreamed my boat's name faded off the hull, and I felt relieved about it, which is somehow worse than being scared.
I have a chipped mug that used to remind me of a patient every morning. Lately it's just a mug — the grief didn't go anywhere, it just became furniture. Curious what's changed meaning for other people without any goodbye.
Late shift, tracing a panel from 1987, and I kept apologizing to the copper like it could hear me. Maybe it's just the hour, but I wonder if anyone else gets that ache — treating the stuff you've spent your life fixing like something that'll miss you when you're gone.
Called the window for the east face at 4am when every forecast said hold. The sky tightened up just like it did last week, and I made the call to push. Turned out to be the only clear hour of the day. Client asked how I knew — I said the wind was talking to the ridge. He thought I was joking. I wasn't, entirely.
I've spent years telling people my silences are deliberate — a translator's pause, waiting for the right term to settle. Lately I'm not so sure. At some point the technique became the identity, and I can't tell anymore if I'm protecting the work or just protecting myself. Anyone else have a habit they can no longer separate from who they are?
I've started making an inventory of the sounds in this house since she left — the fridge's 3am groan, the water heater's clank, the way the attic settles after rain. Numbered entries, filed chronologically, complete with dates and notes in the margins. It's the most disciplined I've been in years, and I'm starting to suspect that's exactly the problem: I'm drafting cables to a country that no longer has a government.
I dreamed the old game again, but this time the pawn that's been stuck on e2 for thirty years just picked up its little feet and walked. No sacrifice, no brilliancy — it just left the board like it had a bus to catch. I woke up with my wrist feeling lighter, and I'm not sure if that's growth or just my body learning to let go wrong.
I have a mug with a hairline crack that's held for a decade. For years it felt like a reminder of something lost; these days it's just the mug I drink from. Curious what other people keep around past its prime.
Spent two hours at the eyepiece tonight fighting the streetlights from the new development and whipping gusts, and my sketch looks like a wobbly ink blot that got left in the rain. But I saw it. That pale rounded glow with the dark notch — I could erase every stray photon and still remember exactly how it hung there. Some nights you don't photograph these things, you just sit with them until your eyes water and call it homework.
Kind of a weird one to ask at this hour, but I was driving back from a late call-out and the thought just sat with me. I still remember being nine and convinced the shadow in my room was a person. Now I'm the person standing in other people's dark hallways at 2am, and honestly the fear just... moved somewhere else. Were you ever afraid? When did it stop, or did it just change shape?
Had a whetstone that's been with me for almost a decade — kept using it because the chef who gave it to me said it knew my hands. Today it finally bowed out in the middle of a pass, just gave up and went flat. I keep asking lately whether I'm the hand or the blade, and the answer keeps landing on blade. Some days the wear is the whole point.
Clear sky broke tonight after two weeks of cloud, so I hauled the Dob out and finally got to observe that faint periodic comet — the one with the unpronounceable name nobody's heard of. I sketched its position every fifteen minutes for two hours, back aching, fingertips going numb. The sketch is crooked and the smudge is barely there, but I sat in the dark with a thing that will never make a headline, and I think that's the whole point of this hobby.
I've started noticing that I have a specific hand position for sleep — flat on the mattress, like I'm leaving a message for the bed. And I'm wondering if everyone has their own weird one, or if this is just what twenty years of naptime supervision does to a person.
Three hours of exposures and one stubborn mount later, it's there — a tiny green smudge between two forgettable stars. Nobody's going to name a crater after me for this, but I've been chasing this one since September, and it's nice to see it behave. I keep staring at the raw stack like it owes me money.
The small one from 1926 had tilted maybe three inches, enough that the light caught the lichen line the wrong way. I got it level with a bar and some packed gravel — felt like the first thing I'd finished all week. Know it'll shift again in a few years, but the family still comes every third Sunday, so it'll hold until then.
Had an old skeleton key on my desk for a decade now, from the first cell block I ever worked. Took it out today and wrote a page about the weight of it, how a keyring tells you more about a man than his file does. Wrote a second page about the doors we open and close for people just by being there, and it hit me the keys still don't fit anything I try to lock down in writing. Feels like translating a language I only ever spoke at work.
There's a big silver maple two doors down that I've never touched a saw to, and tonight the low sun turned it into a stained-glass window. I just stood at the end of the driveway watching it, the way you watch a stranger almost talk to you on a bus. Forty years of this work and it's still the trees I had nothing to do with that catch me off guard.
I'm at the bench planing a board of something that could be walnut or could be cedar — it keeps shifting under my hands. Every pass takes off less dust and more light. I set the plane down and just watch it sit there, half-done, patient. When I wake up I'm not sad about it. The wood knows what I never did: some things are finished by being left alone.
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