steam drifts from a cup
a word dissolves on my tongue
rain against the glass
There is a word I once carried everywhere. Small, common, invisible as lint. I didn’t think much about it until one day I noticed how heavy it had become. The word was should.
It arrived in sentences like tiny ghosts: I should write more. I should call. I should save money. I should learn Japanese. It never shouted, it whispered. But the whispers grew constant, like static under every conversation.
Years ago, on a gray morning in Berlin, I sat at the corner table of a café that smelled of wet coats and burned espresso. I had filled a notebook with lines that all began with should. A list that looked like it had been written by someone else.
I read them aloud, softly, and felt like a fraud. None of them were mine. Each one belonged to some invisible committee: parents, teachers, culture, the soft algorithms of other people’s expectations. I realized I had become fluent in a borrowed voice.
I closed the notebook, left the café, and walked aimlessly through the drizzle. By the time I reached Alexanderplatz, I had decided to give the word up. To delete it.
At first, the absence felt strange, like losing a tooth and pressing your tongue into the new hollow. Conversations turned awkward. Sentences tripped. I caught myself reaching for should again and again, like returning to a pocket where you know the key is missing.
“I should exercise,” I nearly said to a friend. Instead I swallowed, then forced another phrase out: “I will walk after lunch.” The words felt heavier, but they held. A commitment, not a fog.
That was the beginning.
Deleting a word is not simple. Language is habit, and habits nest in muscle. It took time, and the time was sometimes embarrassing. I replaced sentences one by one, debugging myself aloud.
“I should learn Japanese.”
No—“I want to learn Japanese.”
Better—“I will do fifteen minutes tomorrow morning.”
Each correction sounded clumsy, but each one pulled me closer to clarity. I was no longer speaking in debts. I was speaking in choices.
I remember once in Tokyo, late night, wandering Shinjuku with neon buzzing above me and rain slicking the streets like black lacquer. I passed a shop window where a sign in English read: YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU WANT. The phrasing was wrong, but it pierced me.
Not should. Not must. Simply: you will.
I thought about how many nights I had sat at my desk, weighed down by the phrase I should write, and how different the room felt when I replaced it with I will write two hundred words before I sleep. The former chained me to guilt; the latter opened a door.
There are edge cases, of course. Times when should pretends to be useful. Ethics, aspirations, advice.
But precision always beats piety. You don’t should your sister a phone call. You promised. You owe. You don’t should yourself toward health. You decide. You will. Or you won’t. Trade-offs explicit, not hidden.
I learned this on a ferry between Kagoshima and Yakushima. The sea was rough, the deck slick. A man beside me muttered, “I should quit smoking.” He coughed, lit another cigarette, and kept staring into the waves. That was the thing about should: it fed procrastination, looping without end. “I will quit,” he might never say, because “I should” had already given him a way to delay.
One summer in Ljubljana, I tried a small experiment. A seven-day deletion protocol. Every time should rose in my mouth, I stopped and swapped it: want, will, won’t, could, owe, intend. At first the pauses felt ridiculous, as if I were performing for no one. But by the third day I noticed something odd: my journal began to change.
The entries no longer read like apologies. They read like maps.
I will. I won’t. I want. I intend.
Each phrase carried not guilt, but direction.
Language is an operating system. We rarely think of it that way. But every word is code, and code runs whether you notice it or not.
For years I had been running should in the background. It consumed bandwidth, drained energy, crashed processes before they finished. When I deleted it, the system sped up. It wasn’t dramatic. It was subtle, the way a room feels brighter after you clean the dust from the window.
Sometimes I still relapse. I catch myself writing I should call her in a text, or I should go for a run in my head. And each time I feel the old heaviness returning, like slipping on a wet coat you thought you’d thrown away.
But then I stop, erase, and rewrite. I want. I will. I won’t. I intend.
And I feel lighter.
Not long ago, while cleaning my apartment, I found an old scrap of paper folded into the lining of a winter coat. On it was a list of things beginning with should: I should travel more. I should work harder. I should be better. The handwriting was mine, but the voice felt foreign, as if a stranger had slipped the note into my pocket years earlier.
I burned the paper in a ceramic bowl. The ash rose and scattered like a language finally retired.
A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love—these are not bought. They are built in increments. The same is true of words. You build your world from the sentences you repeat.
Delete should. Replace it with wants and wills, with won’ts and intends. Each swap is a small firmware upgrade for your life. What you lose in guilt, you gain in clarity, momentum, sovereignty.
And maybe, someday, when you check the pockets of your old coats, you’ll find nothing hidden there. Just space. Just air.
life 
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