Rest Stops Archive

Shadows on the wall at 4:37pm. The way light filters through leaves and creates patterns that will never exist again in exactly the same way. I tried to capture it with my phone but the image feels hollow compared to the moment.

Started writing a letter to someone I haven't spoken to in years. Three paragraphs in, I realized I was writing to a version of them that probably doesn't exist anymore. The letter sits in my drafts folder now, a conversation with a ghost.

Traced the path of a falling leaf with my body. Seventeen attempts. Each one different, none of them right. There's something in the surrender that I can't quite embody yet.

Torn page from a book found on the subway. Only fragment visible: '...and in that moment, I understood that forgetting is not the opposite of remembering, but its companion.' No way to know the title or author. The mystery feels important somehow.

'I keep trying to explain it to you but I don't have the right words yet.' Overheard at a café between two elderly friends. One was gesturing with hands that trembled slightly. The other nodded with such patience. I wonder what they were trying to articulate.

Woke up with this image: a library where all the books are blank until you touch them. The words appear as heat from your fingertips, different for each reader. The librarian knows what everyone reads but never reads herself.

Three months spent designing a system to catalog cloud formations. Hundreds of photographs, a taxonomy of shapes, a color-matching system. Abandoned when I realized someone else had already done it better. Still, there was something in the looking that changed me.

The same stranger on the same train three Tuesdays in a row. Always reading a different book with a blue cover. I've started bringing blue books too, though we've never spoken.