What We Carry Forward

Defiance, presence, and stories that stay — September 14th - 20th, 2025

New to Brittle Views? This space spans grief and mischief, punk nostalgia and quiet reckonings—essays, fiction, satire, and stories that don’t sit still. If you like writing that lingers as much as it lands, you’re in the right place.

This week was about what we carry forward—through silence, through memory, through the smallest gestures that outlast their moment. In Currents and Crossings, presence became a framework for navigating what comes next, less about retirement than about living aligned. In Holding On, Rachel recognized her brother’s steadiness in a single act of care, proof that some legacies are passed hand to hand rather than spoken aloud. All The Way In returned to the Shoulder of Mutton, where youth’s chaos left behind grease-stained walls and quiet reckonings. And in Just Enough, Maggie B. held space for what another chose not to say, showing how endurance sometimes means letting silence speak.

Together, these pieces suggest that what endures isn’t only memory itself, but the way it shifts us—the way we stay, notice, and let presence carry forward what words can’t.

Here’s everything from the last seven days—each one carrying its own corner of that truth:

Essays

Currents and Crossings

In Currents and Crossings, presence becomes a framework, not a formula—five streams woven into a model for living fully now, and into what comes next.

Holding On

Chapter Eighteen – Holding On

Rachel lingers at a doorway and sees her brother differently: a hand steady on their father’s arm, a coffee cooling on the table. A chapter where presence means more than apology, and silence feels like enough.

Needle Drops

All The Way In

Bread rolls, grease, laughter with no brakes. A Shoulder of Mutton night where memory endures not in the noise, but in the stains that never lifted—and in the way silence settles after the last thwack of pastry.

The Maggie B. Casefiles

Just Enough [Narrated]

Mavis Holt arrives with lemon curd and a swallow brooch. Maggie offers her a profile that says just enough, leaving space for what presence sometimes requires: not to name everything, but to let silence carry it.