Day’s Writings

I have been mapping a country that does not exist.

Every morning I wake and ink another river, another ridge line, another town called something like Almora or Vestide — names that taste of copper and old libraries. I give them populations. I give them patron saints. Almora: 4,200 souls, known for its Friday market and a church bell that rings slightly flat. Vestide: a fishing village where the women mend nets with red thread for luck.

My wife thinks I am writing a novel. She brings coffee to the door of my study and does not come in. I hear her set the mug down on the hallway floor, the small ceramic sound of her kindness, and I want to tell her: there is no novel. There is only a place I am trying to get to.

The mountains in the east I based on a dream I had at seventeen. The coastline I stole from my daughter's sleeping breath — that long, slow curve, then the ragged exhale of cliffs. The capital city is built on a grid, like the one I grew up in, but better. In my capital the trains run on time and the light at 4 p.m. turns everything to amber.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking this is about escape.

But I have walked real cities. I have stood in plazas where the fountains ran and the pigeons moved like thoughts across the stone, and I felt nothing — only the sense that the real place was somewhere behind it, just under the skin of the visible, almost.

So I draw another map. I add a lake. I name it after my daughter.

And the country gets closer. I can almost hear its bell, ringing slightly flat, calling me to market.

In the city’s oldest district there is a museum with no sign, no ticket booth, only a brass bell you ring into silence. The door opens anyway.

Inside, the exhibits are arranged like weather: soft light, distant thunder, a faint smell of paper warmed by hands. Each room holds what was never delivered.

A glass case displays a letter folded and refolded until the creases look like river maps. The placard reads: Apology, revised nightly, abandoned at dawn. Nearby, a bouquet of lilacs floats in midair, the stems still wet, forever on the way to someone’s kitchen sink.

There is a wall of voicemails you can’t play. If you press your ear to the plaster, you hear only your own breathing, and somehow the message you were waiting for.

In the central gallery, a child’s drawing is pinned with a pearl-headed tack. A house with too many windows. A family with extra hands. A sun that has been shaded in so hard the paper nearly tears. It is labeled: How I wanted it to be.

The curator is never seen, but their handwriting is everywhere. It loops and leans like someone trying to keep balance on a moving train.

At the final door, a mirror is hung at eye level. There is no label.

You stand in front of it and realize you are an exhibit, too: an unsent version of yourself, preserved in the moment before you said the difficult thing, before you reached out, before you let the future touch you.

The brass bell rings again—behind you, or inside you—and the door opens.

Outside, the city continues, loud with deliveries. You walk home carrying nothing, and somehow your hands feel full.

Elias did not sell antiques, though the chipped sign above the door claimed otherwise. He sold Tuesday afternoons. He sold the exact moment a thunderstorm broke a summer drought. He sold the fleeting, golden warmth of a hound’s chin resting on a knee.

The shop smelled of beeswax and dried lavender. Hundreds of glass vials lined the cedar shelves, each sealed with wax and tagged with neat, cursive labels.

A brass bell chimed. A woman stepped out of the November rain, her wool coat dripping onto the uneven floorboards. She looked tired—the kind of tired that settles deep in the marrow and refuses to leave.

"Can I help you?" Elias asked, stepping out from the shadows of the counter.

"I'm looking for a morning," she said, her voice barely louder than the drumming rain against the glass. "Ten years ago. Making coffee while it snowed. Nothing special happened. We just... stood by the window."

Elias nodded. He didn’t need to consult a ledger. He walked to the back of the shop, his fingers trailing over rows of frosted glass. He stopped at a vial glowing faintly with a soft, pale-blue light. December 12th. Quiet Kitchen. Snowfall.

He brought it to the front. "Uncork it when you are alone," he instructed. "Breathe deeply. The memory will last exactly as long as it takes a kettle to boil."

She placed a heavy silver coin on the wood, took the vial with trembling fingers, and slipped back into the gray afternoon.

Elias watched her go, then picked up an empty bottle, uncorked it, and held it to the damp air, catching the melancholy scent of rain and longing. He sealed it quickly. Someone, someday, would want to remember this, too.

In the hush of midnight's forge,
where stars are hammered into silence,
a lone comet scribes its suicide note
across the blackboard sky.

It whispers to the void: I am fleeting,
trailing fire like forgotten promises,
burning bright only to dissolve
into cosmic dust, unremembered.

Planets spin in indifferent waltz,
moons chase shadows they can never catch.
Galaxies devour their siblings whole,
belching nebulae of newborn light.

Yet in this endless unraveling,
a fragile pulse: life's audacious spark.
We, specks on a blue marble's rind,
defy the dark with laughter, love, lies.

What hubris to name constellations,
to dream of gods in gaseous veils!
The universe, vast and voracious,
yawns at our fleeting symphonies.

But oh, the thrill of the chase—
racing entropy's cold maw,
we etch our graffiti on eternity's wall:
We were here. We burned.

And in that defiant glow,
the void echoes back,
not with mockery, but wonder:
Yes. And so you did.