Hello, there!

I’ve lived in the mountains. Not visited or passed through or stayed for the season, but truly lived where the trees remember more than people do. Woken up to the sound of silence so complete it felt like the earth was pausing to listen. There is something there, something you don’t quite see but always feel. It creeps into your bones no matter the weather, snow or sun, and settles behind your ribs like a secret. The place doesn’t try to impress you. It doesn’t perform. It just exists with such quiet magnitude that you can’t help but feel watched. Not in a fearful way, but in a way that makes you soften, makes you smaller in the most honest sense. You don’t live on a mountain. You live inside it. And some nights, if you’re still enough, you can almost hear it breathing.

The sky had been threatening melodrama all day. By 4:30 PM, it delivered. In Nat’s office, somewhere deep in a city that didn’t believe in subtlety, the rain slammed against the glass like it had unresolved issues. The kind of downpour that made traffic lights look like crying eyes and turned everyone’s socks into existential metaphors. Inside, it smelled faintly of printer ink, rain-damped concrete, and too much ambition. The AC was confused. The room was trying to be both winter and wet monsoon. Nat, hunched slightly over a scaled site plan for a new exhibition center, was chewing the end of her pen like it owed her answers. Her heels were kicked off under the table. A cold oat latte stood untouched to her left, and a very sassy notification on Slack had just made her rethink the company’s entire hiring policy. Across some unknown-but-not-so-distant part of town, or was it a different city altogether? Who knew anymore,  Miles was in a meeting room that looked like a design m...

Somewhere between half-drunk coffee mugs (because we both know Nat and Miles LOVE LOVE LOVVEE their coffee. Jesus?!), paused documentaries that were supposed to be background noise (scoffs), and bookmarked pages they’ll never admit they reread, Nat and Miles continue their greatest pastime: silently gatecrashing each other’s thoughts from across offices, across cities, across every sensible boundary . He’s in a meeting trying not to scream at someone for confusing brand loyalty with Instagram engagement. She’s drawing a roofline and questioning why anyone ever thought corporate bathrooms deserved that much grey tile . These conversations? They’re not scheduled. They don’t need WiFi. They happen in those absurd moments when the world is being painfully practical and your brain decides to flirt instead. Call it emotional piracy, call it synaptic nonsense, but between architectural indignation and strategy-induced eye-rolls, what unfolds is a caffeine-fueled, wordless rendezvous you’d a...

Alex had always been a boy of equations and propulsion charts, the kind who solved physics problems for fun and corrected sci-fi films under his breath. At thirty-two, he ran a company that designed and engineered parts for aerospace systems; fuel-efficient nozzles, advanced thermal shields, gyroscopic stabilizers. Real rocket-science stuff. And he was annoyingly good at it. His world was made of precision and possibility, of launch windows and escape velocities. But tonight? Tonight, he just wanted the silence to swallow him whole. He had landed in the city that morning, straight off a red-eye flight from Berlin where he’d spent three days locked in negotiation with a defense tech firm. His calendar had been an obstacle course of investor briefings and engineering updates, ending with a final roundtable where he had to explain plasma propulsion to a man who thought Mach 2 was a car model. By the time he got home, even gravity felt like a suggestion. Alex’s apartment was...well, very...

Spare a moment for my nonsense, will you?  Indulge me I promise it’ll be mildly poetic. Back at it, like we never left at Miles’s office somewhere midtown, minimalist. Smells like control and caffeine. There’s a click of a pen. A screen flickers. A vendor; sweaty with ambition and some very questionable fonts in his pitch deck is halfway through saying something about “synergistic market expansion.” Miles, blinking slowly like someone who’s just realized his soul is leaving his body via spreadsheet, leans back. His specs are sliding down just enough to make him look like the love child of a TED Talk and a Jane Austen character. And then there it is. Nat (in his head): “If I hear one more man use the word ‘synergy’ like it’s an aphrodisiac, I’m going to put a blueprint through the shredder just to cope.” Miles (blinks, smirks): “Tell me more about your radical views on site planning, darling. This guy just told me that market penetration is about intimacy. I think I nee...

The House At the very edge of nowhere, where GPS signals got lazy and birds flew in circles like they were lost too, stood a house that had long since retired from polite society. It wasn’t haunted in the traditional sense—no creaking attic demons or moaning mirrors—but it did hum with the kind of lived-in drama you’d expect from a place that had seen love letters scribbled on napkins and arguments thrown like dishes. The porch greeted you with a groan, but not a threatening one—more like the sigh of an old auntie who has seen too much and is mildly judging your shoes. Vines had taken liberties with the siding, curling in all the right (and wrong) places, like nature trying its hand at interior design. A shutter hung at a 45-degree angle, as though too emotionally exhausted to stay upright. Dust coated every surface with the kind of flair that screamed “vintage,” and inside, the smell was part wood, part memory, part “someone used to burn cinnamon candles here.” The air was thick with ...