You know that feeling when you see someone else’s life and it feels like a spoiler for your own? Like, a trailer for a movie you didn't buy a ticket for but you’re stuck in the theater anyway? That’s me tonight. I’m sitting here at 2 AM with the baby finally asleep and the blue light of my phone is the only thing making me feel real. I’m looking out the window at my neighbor’s workshop. Bill. He’s a retired carpenter and the man is out there every single day, twelve hours a day, building these goddamn birdhouses. They’re beautiful, I guess, in a way that things are when you put too much of your soul into them, but he’s not doing it for the birds. He’s doing it because the kitchen is too quiet. It’s all pine shavings and that high-pitched scream of the table saw over there. He’s got this obsession with the joints, making sure everything is flush, perfectly square—I've seen him out there through the slats of the fence. But it’s a performance. We humans are weird like that—we create work to fill the space where a life should be. You watch him sand a piece of cedar for three hours and you realize he’s just trying to sand away the sound of his wife breathing in the other room. She’s in there, sitting at that yellow linoleum table, and the silence between them is so thick you could probably cut it with one of his chisels. It’s an ontological tragedy, honestly. I went over there yesterday to drop off some mail that got misdelivered. The kitchen was... I don't know, it felt like a museum of things that used to matter. She looked at me with these eyes that were sort of vacant, sort of desperate, and asked if I wanted tea. I said no because I could feel the gravity of that room trying to pull me in. She spends all day waiting for a man who is thirty feet away but might as well be on the moon. It’s this weird thing where two people inhabit the same coordinates but different universes. She’s trapped in the quiet and he’s trapped in the noise he makes to drown her out. And the thing is, I get it. I’m a stay-at-home parent, right? My life is a series of small, repetitive tasks that don’t actually mean anything in the grand scheme of things. I spend my day wiping surfaces and managing tiny humans who don’t know I’m a person yet. You reach a point where you start to feel like you’re just a ghost haunting your own house. You look in the mirror and you don’t see a person, you see a utility. A function. A "mom" or a "provider" or a "carpenter." I think we are fundamentally incapable of being fully seen once we take on these roles. We just become the furniture. We have this collective delusion that if we just keep our hands busy, the big questions won't catch up to us. But they always do. Bill’s birdhouses are piling up in his garage—hundreds of them. No one needs that many birdhouses. It’s a literal monument to his inability to sit across from the woman he’s loved for forty years and realize they have nothing left to say. It makes me feel sick, maybe. Like, is this the end game? You work and you raise kids and then you just... hide in a shed until you die because the person you chose is now a stranger? We’re all just kind of pretending, aren't we? We build these elaborate structures—careers, hobbies, birdhouses—to avoid the raw, screaming fact of our own isolation. You can be married to someone for a lifetime and still be a total stranger to them. It’s sort of beautiful in a tragic way but mostly it’s just pathetic. I look at my partner sleeping right now and I wonder if I’m building my own version of a workshop. Maybe this late-night scrolling is my birdhouse. Maybe I’m just sanding down the edges of my own resentment so I don't have to look at it when the sun comes up. I feel like I’m losing my mind a little bit tonight. The baby will be up in four hours and I’ll start the cycle again. The laundry, the snacks, the "how was your day" when he gets home from work. But I’ll be thinking about Bill. I’ll be thinking about the way he touched the wood—so gentle, so careful—while he treats his own marriage like a chore he’s finished with. It’s a total mind-fuck. We value the things we create more than the people we create them for. I guess I’m just scared. Scared that I’m already in the workshop and I don’t even have a saw. You ever feel like your life is just a series of rooms you’re trying to escape? I want to go over there and scream at him to go inside and talk to her, but then I’d have to go back to my own kitchen. And the silence there is starting to sound a lot like a table saw. It’s just... it’s a lot. I’m just tired. Maybe I should just buy some pine and start building something too... maybe that's how it starts.