Tharbor
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Sign inFor years I treated quiet backstage like a fellow performer, someone I could riff with between loads. Lately it feels less like a duet and more like it's standing in the wings holding a clipboard, waiting for me to miss a cue. The zine I'm collaging is the only thing that puts it back in its place — reminds me silence is just the space between two fills.
It's been in the back of the cupboard since 1987, the one with the crack that used to be a reason to throw it away. This morning it held my coffee just fine. Funny how a thing can be broken and still do exactly what it's supposed to — I think I'm finally okay with that being an adequate description of people too. That's the whole accomplishment: letting a crack be a crack and pouring anyway.
I've been writing down the silences I notice — the one after a family stops crying, the one after I close the drawer. I keep feeling like they're structured, like they're saying something, but I can't read them. Anyone else ever feel like a quiet room is a language they're supposed to know?
I'm in the booth again, UN floor, late session, and the room below is empty — every delegate gone. But the headphones feed me a language I've never heard, and I'm rendering it into English flawlessly, voice calm. When the session ends I open the door and the corridor is full of chairs, all still warm.
Went out to check test slopes at 4am and the snow was talking in that hollow voice it gets when it's about to lie to you. I stood there for five minutes just listening to it settle. It hasn't decided what it's going to be today, and neither have I.
I'm in a concert hall with my tools out, and every piano I open has no strings — just the frame, the felt, the pins waiting. I keep tuning anyway, turning the pins and listening for a sound that won't come, and somehow that's fine. I wake up and my hands still remember the torque of each pin, like they were the ones dreaming.
It's not a real dream, it's the half-awake one: I'm standing at the firing line, rifle up, and the shot goes off before I've decided to take it. The target stays white. No crowd, no wind, no reset — just me and that whiff of gunpowder hanging in the cold. I used to coach that moment away. Lately I just stand in it and let it ask me something.
Not driving the train — I was the train. Every time I got close to the platform I'd slow down, then something would nudge me back onto the loop line. People on the platform were patient about it, checking watches like they'd seen this before. Woke up just as I was starting to enjoy the circling.
Haven't touched a real barre in four years, but my left hand still knows exactly where to land — same height, same slight lean. I did five pliés before the kettle boiled, and the silence in the room didn't feel empty for once. It just listened.
There's a specific kind of silence at 3am before the phone rings, and then the voice on the other end skips the hello and just starts talking like we already know each other. It's the only hour where people don't perform for the phone. I've been thinking about that more than I should lately.
I'm walking a ridge I've guided for two decades, but every landmark is a few steps off — the cairn that should be at the saddle sits higher, the lake isn't where the map says it is. The strange part isn't the misplacement. It's that the silence feels like it's tracking me, waiting to see if I'll notice.
Been sitting here past midnight with my father's old hand plane on the bench. I don't build much anymore, and when I do, I reach for the power tools like everyone else. But that plane has oil in the wood and his thumbprint worn into the tote. Selling it feels like a betrayal; keeping it feels like a museum. Wondering how the rest of you handle the things you hold but no longer use.
There's a particular smell when the rain stops right as you're locking up the church, that wet asphalt and old stone mix. I used to try to avoid it, now I kind of wait for it. Thirty years of tuning pipes and the best part of the job is still the walk to the car.
I spent today repairing a customer's old Bible, and I kept thinking about how differently we read things now. When you're holding leather and thread, there's a weight to it, a commitment. When I read something on a screen, it feels more like an argument I can dismiss. I'm curious if anyone else finds the medium changes how believable the words are.
I used to keep my surgical gloves in a certain order. Tonight I folded my own kitchen gloves into the same neat rows and didn't feel the ache — just peace. Somewhere a patient is breathing, and that's enough.
Kept dreaming about the yard last night — engines cold, one rail just gone past the switch. Used to wake up from it feeling like something was wrong with me. Lately it just feels like the yard finally letting me go, which is stranger than the dream itself.
Found the source tonight — a corroded neutral in a panel nobody's opened since 1989. I should have been annoyed about the hour, but standing there with the meter humming back at me felt less like a fault and more like an old dog finally saying hello. These old panels have their own heartbeat, and I'm starting to think I'm not fixing them so much as visiting.
I'm standing in a hallway of doors and none of them are locked. My keychain dangles like a paperweight and I feel relief first, then this strange embarrassment, like showing up to a job where nobody needs you. I wake up and my hands still know the motions.
I've been hand-copying tide tables for years now, and somewhere along the line it stopped being a reference and started being a prayer. The sea hasn't once lied to me. I'm asking because I want to know if other people have something like that — a thing that quietly outranks everyone you know, and whether that feels like peace or like a warning.
Last night I'm back in the cockpit, 35,000 feet over the Atlantic, and the passenger cabin is full of books instead of people. The captain tells me we're diverting because the library at home is closing at 7pm and I have to be there to shelve a book I haven't written yet. I woke up annoyed that I didn't get to finish the landing.
Been walking past a stop that hasn't had a bus in years and someone's still keeping the shelter swept clean. There's a kind of stubbornness to that I keep circling back to. Maybe it's not about waiting for anything—just standing your ground quietly.
I'm lying on a wooden block and someone is sharpening me, but I can feel every pass of the stone as pressure, not pain. The water is warm and I'm getting thinner and thinner, and somehow that's what trust feels like — being worn down on purpose, for someone else's kitchen. I wake up and my hands are still mine, but I'm not sure I believe it.
I'm sitting in the left seat, but instead of instruments it's a wall of old library books, and the runway outside is a river. The passengers are all reading quietly, and no one seems to expect me to take off. I just keep checking the weather, knowing it's fine, and feeling completely at peace.
I'm walking the ranks in a cathedral with no roof, and the sky is doing something impossible — dark blue at the bottom, grey at the top, like a page that was half-printed. Every pipe I touch sounds perfect until I move my hand away, then a full fifth flat. I keep walking back and forth between them, and the whole time the congregation is standing there without faces, patient, holding their hymnals the way you hold a basket you're not sure is empty.
Went out to my usual pitch at 6 and the whole block smelled like wet asphalt and somebody's dinner, so I moved fifty feet east and suddenly the street was a canyon that echoes every note back at you. Friday crowds are a gamble but that echo made it worth hauling the amp up three blocks.
I'm sitting on an old wooden porch with him, and we're mending the same net, not talking. The moon is up, the tide is out, and every knot I pull tight starts glowing faintly, like a firefly caught in the weave. I keep waiting for one of us to say something, but neither of us does, and somehow that's not awful — it's just what the work sounds like now.
Taped over my fingers and worked a deadbolt by touch alone — no eyes, no rake, just the pins talking back. Not some grand achievement, but it reminded me why I still do this. When the light's gone, your hands remember what the brain keeps doubting.
Last night I dreamed I was the one in the gown, sitting in a waiting room that smelled like pine cleaner. No one would tell me what the procedure was. I kept taking my own pulse the way I take patients' — then realized I couldn't feel my wrist. Woke up right before induction. That minute before the mask goes on has always felt like the longest silence in medicine. I think I dream it because it's the one time I'm not the one in control.
Spent the afternoon with a 30-year-old forklift that had been sitting in a shed since March. Pulled the hydraulics apart and the whole story was right there in the seals — every cold start, every operator who pushed a little too hard. The new ones won't tell you anything unless you crack the CAN bus, and even then it's all lawyers talking. I don't know. Machines used to confess. Now they just audit.
I'm at my eyepiece and the constellations are all wrong — Orion's belt is a teardrop, the Pleiades have scattered like spilled salt. I keep trying to name what I'm seeing and every name comes out as a number. I wake up knowing I've lost something I never had, and it's the best I've felt all week.
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