What I’ve Been Working On

こえのない
ことばがひかる
よるのすみ

koe no nai / kotoba ga hikaru / yoru no sumi
silent words / give off light / in the corner of night

Most nights I write with the window cracked open to let the city in. The radiator clicks like an old watch. A bicycle leans against the hallway wall and ticks as it cools. On the desk: a chipped mug, a fountain pen that stains my thumb blue, a notebook with a coffee ring shaped like a small eclipse. This is the workshop where my blog is being built, plank by plank, with the kind of attention you give to things that are shy.

It started quietly. A few paragraphs about the way afternoon light arrives late in winter, how a repaired bowl can hold more than soup, how certain streets smell of rain and bread at the same time. I did not intend to start a project, I only wanted to save small moments from evaporation. But the posts kept coming, and soon there was a thread. I followed it.

Somewhere along the way I began to want reach, not for applause, not for speed, but for resonance. I want these pages to travel as scent does, through cracks and under doors, until they find people who have been living with unnamed weather and need a word for it. I want the right readers to feel found, the way a misplaced glove finds its partner on a fence.

There is a map taped to the inside of the closet door. Pushpins mark places where a message arrived from a stranger. Sapporo, Novi Sad, Oaxaca, Kochi, Ghent. The notes are never long. A woman who reads during night shifts says the posts feel like a warm kitchen light. A man in a quiet town says he takes the words on walks. Someone wrote from a hospital corridor to say the haiku at the start made the waiting softer. When I doubt the point of all this, I open the closet and look at the map. The string between the pins is thin, but you can feel the tug.

My days have learned the rhythm. In the mornings I edit by hand, slow enough to hear the sentence breathe. I copy a page onto real paper, then remove everything that sounds like a trick. In the afternoon I walk a loop that crosses two bridges and a park bench with a brass plaque for someone who must have loved that view. I collect textures as I go. Wet walnut leaves. Tram bells. The sour-sweet smell that rises from the bakery vent at 16:20. In the evening I photograph simple things in black and white, the way I was taught to look in Kyoto by a man who said the shadow is the story. Later I return to the desk and try to pair a feeling with a sentence that can carry it without spilling.

There is a drawer of failed drafts. The titles are honest and a little embarrassing. “On Cutting Fruit Carefully.” “Mornings That Refuse Their Names.” “How to Sit With an Evening.” Sometimes I resurrect a line months later, the way you rescue a shard from a broken plate to repair another. The rest becomes compost for whatever needs to grow next. Nothing is wasted, only slowed.

Success, if I say the word carefully, would be this: a reader at 3 a.m. who closes the page and feels less alone. A teenager who prints a paragraph and tucks it into a subway ticket, because the words made a room inside a noisy day. A person who never leaves comments, who never subscribes, who simply returns to read and breathe and then goes on with their life a little steadier. Numbers would be useful only in the way a lighthouse is useful, to say there is a shore here, you can approach with care.

I am trying to earn the kind of reach that does not shout. That is the work. It means refusing easy sentences, letting silence remain in the places where silence carries more truth than adjectives, trimming every paragraph until what is left feels like bone. It means publishing slowly and standing by what I put into the world. It means replying to letters as if they were hand delivered, because they are.

Some nights the cursor blinks like an impatient metronome and nothing comes. The refrigerator hum grows loud. I make tea, peel a pear in one unbroken ribbon, stand in the kitchen and listen to the kettle settle, air moving inside metal, a small weather system. I remind myself that invisible work is still work. Clay rests between firings. Muscles grow while you sleep. The river clears itself by moving. I go back to the desk and change the angle of the lamp. Sometimes that is enough.

I have not said this before, but the blog has a box of objects. A coin that someone left on a windowsill in a mountain temple, a button from a coat that never fit, a page torn from a library book that says “continue on the next leaf.” When I lose the thread, I take one object out and write what it remembers. The coin smells faintly of cedar, the button of wool and cold air, the page of a hand I never met. It seems foolish, and it works.

I imagine what else it could become. A small book printed on rough paper that stains the fingers faintly grey. A circle of readers who meet once a month to practice noticing. A series of letters mailed in real envelopes to those who prefer to read at kitchen tables rather than on glass. A quiet exhibition of words and photographs in a room that smells of pine, the windows hung with thin, moving curtains. Nothing loud, nothing that needs a stage, only a set of rooms where attention is not a scarce resource.

There are practical things too. I am learning how to build the site so it feels like a walk, not a maze. The menu is simple. The type has enough air around it. Images open like windows and then close without drama. I choose colors carefully, the way you choose fruit. I keep an index of recurring motifs so I do not repeat myself by accident. Bridges. Warm bread. Cracks that behave like rivers. Trains that arrive on time, or do not. The moon when it gets stuck in a windowframe.

On Sundays I schedule nothing. I clean the lens of the camera and delete photographs that only look like photographs. I take the tram to the end of the line and walk back. People speak in fragments on Sundays. A child wants to know why pigeons always look like they are thinking. A woman says she is tired in a way that sleep will not fix. A man parks his bike and touches the seat once, the way you might thank a horse. These stray sentences become scaffolding for the week’s post, a way to leave room for other lives inside my own.

If you have arrived here, reading this, you already know more about what I am making than most. I am building a place that treats attention as sacred and time as slow, where the ordinary is allowed to be miraculous without decoration. I want it to succeed in the only way that feels honest, by reaching the people who need it and letting them keep it.

I also want to be clear about the size of my hope. It is not small. I want the blog to be a home for thousands, not to impress anyone, but because the world is crowded with hurried rooms and we need more places where a person can set down the bag they carry and sit for a while. I want a long table where readers pass good sentences the way they pass bread, still warm, still steaming in the cold air. I want the posts to outlive the screen, to be printed and folded and forgotten in a coat pocket, then found again on a day that requires a gentler kind of courage.

Tonight the city is quiet enough that I can hear a train cross the bridge by the river. The sound arrives a few seconds after the light. I think of all the apartments it passes, all the small desks, all the people sitting up late trying to make something that did not exist yesterday. We are invisible to one another, yet we are company. That thought is a kind of reach too.

I will keep writing. I will keep tending this corner until it grows edges that touch other rooms. If you are here, you are part of that growth. Read when you can. Share what moves you. Tell me what you saw on your way home. If you subscribe, you are not joining a list, you are adding a chair.

The bridge is not finished, and that is its grace. Every day another board. Every night another nail, set softly so the wood does not split. One morning soon, we will meet at the middle. We will recognize each other by the way we look at the light. And for a moment that is not small, the distance between island and island will feel like something a person can cross.