Daydream Archivist
So if you see me staring off — eyes fogged, mouth softened into silence — leave me. I’m not lost. I’m just visiting a better part of me.
I’d long ago realized there is a corner of the mind that collects oddities like a junk drawer — half-drawn inventions, arguments never had, grocery lists from imaginary countries. Stray passwords to portals that don’t exist. And random notes written to my therapist in white ink on black paper.
The sort of secrets only visible if you already know they’re there.
Walking to the café one overcast afternoon, the smell of rain on concrete — petrichor! — evoked an old memory — not vivid enough to name, but heavy with feeling. Like the scent of a dream forgotten upon waking. It hung there in the brain like an invasive fog, and the thought came, uninvited but welcome.
Maybe nostalgia is just homesickness for versions of ourselves we never became.
In the café, the barista wore socks that didn’t match and served existential dread alongside the espresso. She smiled like she knew things she wasn’t allowed to say out loud. That sort of smile tends to unravel the entire day, pulling at the seams of reality until it feels as though the world is held together by a thread and one person’s patience.
Persistence? Meet Patience.
On a park bench that leaned too far left, there was a long silence filled only by birds too melodramatic for their size. One black-capped chickadee screamed like it had seen the end of time. Of course it had not. But the thought lingered — what if some birds remember things we don’t? Ancient winds. The grief of extinct trees. The first laugh ever laughed. And those many colorful things too many to mention.
Pondering. Always pondering.
And so the day passed, in distinctively-memorable fragments. Observations stored like pressed flowers in a mental journal no one would ever read.
Night came not with drama but with the quiet creak of a drawer closing.
Sometimes, the melancholy was sharp. It arrived unannounced and asked if any of these stray thoughts would ever lead to something. A book? A revelation? Even a decent conversation? But the question passed like a breeze through an open window.
The answer was always the same. Maybe not. But what a strange joy it is to keep thinking them anyway.
After all, not every thought needs to be useful.
Some just need a home.
And Then
It actually started with a book club. Or more accurately, a wine club disguised as a book club, disguised as a safe space for midweek sighing.
I’ve this ongoing urge to misplace myself. Not in any dramatic way, really. Just to become someone who drinks pineapple juice at breakfast or wears expensive, androgynous colognes or answers the phone cheerfully. And with obvious zest. I imagine these alternate selves and they all seem exhausted by me.
Is loneliness just a trick the soul plays so it can listen to itself more closely?
I am not lonely. I am saturated with solitude. They are not the same. Loneliness howls. Solitude hums. Right now, I am humming. In a minor key, yes. But still — a music.
There is a place in my mind I return to where nothing has ever happened. I go there to feel what I am without context. Without biography. Just the hum of being.
My left hand feels more real than my right. The right one performs, writes, holds the fork. But the left — the left knows things. It lingers.
Often, I will open my drawer of old letters. I don’t read them. I just let my fingers rest on the paper. It’s enough, sometimes, to feel the thickness of past words. As if love could still be pulsed through fingerprints.
I once fell in love with someone because of the way they closed a book — gently, as if the story had feelings. Which they do.
Don’t they?
Cover Music
It was like All That Is had handed over Her voice to a jukebox, and now the machine spun songs no one asked for, to cover truths no one could bear.
Sundry
The static behind conversations. When people speak to me, I hear the unsaid – the fatigue behind their cheer, the small tremor in their certainty. It’s a burden wrapped in intuition. I don’t do crowds. I do solitary walks and long stares into cups of black coffee.
Trauma is ungracious. It doesn’t knock. It enters. But after seventy years, I no longer fight it. I let it sit beside me. And we often talk.
Bipolar disorder tempts me toward extremes — toward nights where thought outpaces the body, toward days where gravity is not just a metaphor but a physical force, pulling me down into the mattress.
PTSD, in turn, is a trespasser — an old wound slamming! barging! into the room uninvited. A smell, a sound, the wrong inflection in a voice and suddenly I am elsewhere, another time, another self. Consciousness becomes less a smooth river and more a broken mirror in which past and present fight for reflection.
I’m simply unfinished. A sentence still searching for its final punctuation. Some days I hope it’s a period. Other days I hope it’s an ellipsis … but most days, I’m hopeful someone will want to read my short stories and essays and nod. Even if they don’t understand any of them.
Especially if they don’t understand.