I never thought I’d be the type to sit here, tapping away on a screen in the dark, spilling my guts to strangers. But here I am... it’s 2 AM, and the workshop is cold, and the house feels even colder. My wife… she’s asleep, I guess. Or trying to be. It started a few years back, when I retired from the construction company. Thought I’d finally have time for all those things I put off. Travel, maybe. Fishing. But the quiet… the quiet got to me. Especially in the kitchen. She always liked to just sit there after dinner, sometimes for hours, with her cup of tea. Just… be. And I’ve never been good at just being. Not since my time in the service. You learn to stay busy, you learn to keep your head down, you learn to never let your guard down. Still got that drilled into me, I guess. So I started with one birdhouse. Just something to do. Keep my hands busy. Keep my mind from wandering to places it shouldn’t go. Then it was two, then five. Now, I spend twelve hours a day out there. More, sometimes. The smell of saw dust and wood glue is almost comforting. It’s a good distraction. A good, loud, busy distraction. The whir of the saw, the tap of the hammer… it all keeps the other noises out. The ones in my head, and the ones that aren’t there, if that makes sense. She tried to talk to me about it once. “Don’t you want to come inside, dear?” she asked. “It’s so quiet without you.” I just grunted something about a new design, needing to finish a batch for the craft fair. I could see the look in her eyes… the hurt, maybe? The confusion. And I just wanted to go back to my workshop. The thought of sitting in that quiet kitchen, just the two of us, with nothing to *do*… it feels like something is going to break. Like *I’m* going to break. Sometimes I wonder what she thinks I’m doing out there all that time. Building some kind of monument to all the things I didn’t say? To all the years I spent just getting through? I’m pushing sixty-five soon. And instead of sitting with the woman I married, instead of talking, or even just *being*, I’m building another wren house. Another robin feeder. And I know it’s wrong. I know I’m avoiding something, probably everything. But I don’t know how to stop. And I don’t know what happens if I do.