Day’s Writings

I have been drawing maps of a country I've never visited.

Every morning at 4 AM, before the honest light arrives, I sit at my drafting table and ink rivers that flow toward no sea. I name mountains in a language I invented at eleven and have been refining ever since. Velikh. Tsorunda. The syllables feel true in the mouth, which is its own kind of accuracy.

My wife thinks I am writing a novel. I let her think this because novel is a word people understand, and I am building a country so detailed it might become real is not.

I have census data. I have trade disputes between the coastal province of Elm and the highland villages where they still ferment that bitter root—kashel—and drink it at funerals. I know which bridges have weight limits. I know where the fog collects on autumn mornings: in the bowl of the Lissek Valley, so thick that children walk to school with bells around their wrists.

The bells were the detail that frightened me. I did not decide them. I was drawing the valley and I heard them—small, copper, slightly mistuned—and I understood that the children had always worn them, long before I arrived at my drafting table with my coffee and my fine-nibbed pen.

Sometimes I think I am not inventing but receiving. That the country exists in some adjacent frequency and I am merely the antenna, the switchboard, the slow and faithful transcriber.

And sometimes, worse, I think it is the other country that is real, and this one—with its mortgage payments and its highway noise and my wife breathing softly in the other room—is the one I am imagining.

The bells again. Always at 4 AM.

I pick up my pen.

The first time I slept here, the walls were polite. They held their breath when I turned the key, as if unsure whether I’d stay long enough to deserve echoes.

I unpacked in small ceremonies: a mug that still remembered other cupboards, a book that opened to the same sentence like a prayer, a plant with one stubborn leaf. Each object was a witness I brought to testify: yes, I intend to be real.

At night the house practiced my footsteps. Floorboards repeated them in softer voices after I’d passed, like a child learning a language behind a door. The radiators clicked their teeth, rehearsing warmth. Pipes hummed under the sink, an old song without lyrics, and in it I could almost hear a welcome, or the shape of one.

Once, during a storm, the power cut out and the rooms filled with dark the way a bowl fills with water—slow, complete, intimate. I lit a candle. The flame’s small confidence made the shadows honest. In that trembling light the hallway looked longer, but less threatening, as if the house had stopped pretending to be larger than it was.

Days stitched themselves together. My laughter learned which corners to linger in. My silence found the places it could rest without falling through.

Now, when I come home with rain on my sleeves, the door doesn’t resist. The lock turns like it has been waiting. The air meets me halfway, already shaped to my shape.

Sometimes I wake before dawn and listen. The house is not quiet; it is keeping me.

And somewhere in the grain of the banister, in the dust on the windowsill, in the steady patience of the ceiling above my bed, the house is saying my name—correctly—over and over, so it won’t forget.

Elara’s shadow detached itself on a Tuesday. It didn't sneak away under the cover of night; it simply refused to stand up when she got off the park bench at noon.

Elara tugged her coat, cleared her throat, and took a tentative step forward. The shadow remained draped across the wooden slats, an inky silhouette of a woman crossing her legs and lighting a phantom cigarette.

"Excuse me," Elara whispered, glancing around the plaza to see if anyone had noticed the physics-defying rebellion.

The shadow blew a plume of dark, translucent smoke. It didn't have a face, but Elara felt the weight of an exhausted glare. I'm taking a personal day, the posture seemed to say.

Elara thought of the sprawling spreadsheet waiting on her glowing monitor. She thought of the stale coffee in the breakroom and the humming fluorescent lights that bleached the color from her skin. She looked back at her shadow, which was currently leaning back and stretching its arms behind its head, soaking up the harsh midday sun.

"Will you be back for dinner?" Elara asked.

The shadow gave a noncommittal shrug.

Elara nodded once. She left it there, a dark stain of leisure on the sunlit bench, and walked back to the office feeling inexplicably light. For the rest of the afternoon, she cast no silhouette against the boardroom walls. No one noticed. But every time she typed a number into a cell, she imagined the cool park breeze, the warm wood against her back, and the quiet, breathtaking thrill of simply refusing to move.

In the hush of midnight's velvet shroud,
where stars dissolve like forgotten sighs,
a lone wanderer traces veins of light—
galaxies uncoiling, serpents of fire.

She whispers to the abyss, her voice
a fragile thread spun from dream and dust.
"What am I," she asks, "but echo's child?
A fleeting spark in eternity's maw?"

The void replies not with thunder's roar,
but silence, vast and tender as a lover's pause.
It cradles her fears, her joys, her rage—
mirrors them back in infinite refractions.

Here, in this boundless nowhere, she finds
the shape of self: not stone, not flame,
but wave upon wave, cresting, crashing,
receding into the heart of all that is.

No gods to kneel before, no chains to bind;
only the pulse of cosmos in her veins.
She laughs, then, into the endless night—
for in the void, she is both lost and found.