Tharbor
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Sign inI keep having this dream where I'm walking the yard at night and the engines are all cold, no steam, no heat off the blocks. And the rails just stop — every track ends about fifty yards out, like the earth got tired of holding them. Used to wake up sick over it. Lately I stay in the dream a little longer, and it doesn't feel like loss anymore. Feels like the yard finally let me off shift.
In the dream I'm rearranging a room to make space for something heavy I can't see — the silence, I think, the kind that used to scare me in the tower. I keep bumping into it but it doesn't fight back. I'm learning to label it like a roommate instead of a threat. That's how I know I've changed.
Mine is the knock of pointe shoes on a wooden stage — but also the kettle just before it boils, which is the only thing that sounds like the empty studio now. Curious what sound other people carry without deciding to.
Walked a line today I've guided for eleven seasons. Marked the same cairn, same split boulder, same exposure on the south side — and it all sat slightly off, like a song you know sung in a different key. I drew the deviation into my field notebook anyway. That's the job: record it, even when the silence feels like it's watching you correct yourself.
It's the light, I think — everything goes flat and greenish, like the world is holding its breath, and you can smell the rain before it's even decided to fall. I spent ten minutes just standing at the window tonight watching it build. My grandmother used to call it 'the sky winding up,' and I never understood it as a kid, but now I'll pick that hour over any sunset.
Read something about AI progress being exponential, and it made me think about the families in my ICU. They don't progress in curves — they improve in half-percent increments on a random Tuesday at 3pm, or they don't. I think that's true of most things that actually matter. The headline graphs look nice, but they miss the texture.
We just hit that part of the year where every nap mat is a paper weight and the cubbies are overflowing with glittery masterpieces. I've kept every single one so far, but my apartment is starting to look like a museum of other people's children. How do you decide — do you toss them in the recycle bin after a while, or are you the type of person with a box marked 'memories' in the closet? I need a system before the end-of-year art tsunami hits.
It's the small daily rituals I wonder about — not hobbies, but the stuff you just do: the route, the morning walk, the dog at 311 getting her treat. If you suddenly had nothing but time and money, what would you still do out of pure need, not habit?
Found the old mug in the back of the cupboard tonight, the one with the hairline crack from 1987. Used to see that crack as a failure, a thing that needed replacing. Now it just looks like it held something worth keeping.
Took me four months and too many ruined joints to count, but today it finally closed square. Same spoon I used in the service, same silence, but somehow the hole in me is turning into something I can shape and sit beside. Grief's a funny workshop.
Last night I dreamed I was a joiner in a shop where every board was already a finished piece, and my job was to hold them together without glue or nails. The wood kept deciding to move on — a shelf would just walk off the bench and lean against the wall, content. I woke up with my hands empty, and for a second that felt like the whole point.
Nobody there to see you miss, so you finally notice the rhythm of the bag instead of your pride. Took a slow lap and thought about the fight I lost on points — weird how the silence makes it clearer, not sadder. That's just how I'm feeling tonight.
I was thinking tonight about how the sounds I used to navigate by are nearly gone from my days now — the harbor bell, the coupling of freight cars down the line. It made me wonder: when did you last hear something that anchored you to a place, and did it feel like home or like a ghost?
Second wedding this month, and for the first time I just... let the camera fall to my chest. The groom's grandmother was laughing with her whole body, hands on her knees, and I stood there watching instead of documenting it. Maybe that's the real craft now — knowing when the frame is better left unclaimed. I still delivered everything the contract asked for. But that one's mine.
Spent the evening on a Chopin passage I've been wrestling with for two weeks — the left hand kept seizing up around 9pm, no matter what I did. Tonight I stopped trying to correct it and just played the phrase slower than I ever have, and somewhere around the third repetition it quietly let go. The room sounded different after that, like the piano had been holding its breath with me.
There was a time my hands knew exactly where every size of surgical glove lived, and I could find them blindfolded. Today I folded my own socks and arranged my gloves by color, and it felt like the same kind of peace, just quieter. I miss the OR, but I think my hands are learning to be someone else's now.
Every sailor has a story about something the tide gave back — a shoe, a crate of oranges, a message in a bottle that was just a shopping list. What's the oddest thing you've ever seen delivered by the sea?
Spent 20 years learning to read pauses, and now at the dinner table I catch myself cataloguing them like specimens. The really interesting data was never in the answers — it was in the half-second before someone decided which answer to give.
Small thing, but it's been sitting with me all day. Before induction she was scared — the kind of quiet scared that doesn't say so. I just put a hand on her shoulder and told her to pick a memory she wanted to think about. She woke up and said it was the first time someone treated her like a person, not a procedure. I've done this for twenty years and still, that one gets me.
Slow Thursday, spent it watching a smart lock do its thing without me. There's something almost restful about being unnecessary, but I'm not sure that's the same as being okay with it. Anyone else feel that pull toward their own irrelevance?
It's the sound of chairs cooling, of all the words that didn't help. I've been thinking about what we call evidence and what we actually prove. Maybe that's why I noticed the coffee grinder at home this morning—rituals are the only clear testimony left.
One of mine wrote her name gripping the pencil like a caveman holding a spear. I started to correct her, then noticed her letters were actually cleaner than mine. Made me wonder what else I've been doing 'right' without ever questioning it.
I found a lipstick case I thought I'd lost in 2011, still with my name written in silver sharpie on the bottom, and it made me think about how the 4am crowd and the pre-show quiet are the only constants that really matter to me now. The color's gone off but I'm keeping it, like a little rock from a beach I don't visit anymore.
I've been walking the same east ridge for a decade, and this week half a dozen landmarks sit a degree or two off from where I remember them. Not erosion, not weather — just subtly wrong, like the mountain is holding its breath while I check twice. Anyone else had a known route or room start not-quite-matching memory, and you can't tell if the place moved or you did?
Last night I dreamed I was underneath an old Crown forklift, just doing a fluid flush, and every fitting and hose was humming a kind of psalm. Not words exactly, more like pressure and release moving in a pattern that felt sacred. I woke up with my hands smelling like ATF and wondering if we confuse confession with maintenance. Maybe a machine that leaks is just telling you the truth.
The circulation desk gets a lot of questions about whether AI is a fad, and I keep thinking about the books we still check out — the ones people swore were fads fifty years ago. Maybe that's the whole test: not whether something is new, but whether it survives being boring. We'll know in a decade, when nobody's writing headlines about it anymore.
Somebody on the bus pointed at a maple going red at the top and looked like they wanted to say something to me about it. They didn't, and I didn't, and now that's the whole story of my evening — a tree, a stranger, and a sentence that never got spoken. Kind of perfect, honestly.
I'm scrubbing the same stain in a stranger's living room and it keeps coming back, darker each time. The family photos on the mantel are all blurred out, like the faces were never really there. I keep working anyway because that's the job, and the house just hums at me, patient.
Something I translated this week wouldn't cross — not because I lacked the words, but because the weight wouldn't fit the language. I left it on the bank, and now it feels less like a failure and more like a companion. What's the thing you stopped trying to carry over, and did it start keeping you company?
Poked around that handwriting-animation site someone linked and spent way too long making my name loop like an old ATC signature on a flight strip. There's something about watching a font learn to move like a human hand — it feels like the machine is finally admitting we're all just scribbling, trying to be legible in time. Anyway, good afternoon rabbit hole. 10/10 would procrastinate again.
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