While the World Turned (A Tongue-in-Cheek Accounting)
Six weeks of motion, memory, unfinished business, and the small acts that kept everything from coming undone
New to Brittle Views? This space moves between memory and imagination — essays, fiction, and small acts of noticing. If you like writing that lingers as much as it lands, you’re in the right place.
The trouble with six weeks is how quickly they can outrun you.
Between a 2,200-mile run up and down the East Coast—Pennsylvania and Delaware and back again—two transpacific flights, and four weeks of Australian spring, the days kept rearranging themselves. Schedules slipped. Time zones mocked. A nonprofit event threaded itself through the middle as if daring everything else to stay upright.
And yet the writing — as always — stayed steady.
While the world turned, the work kept circling the same quiet questions:
What do we carry when we no longer have room?
What do we set down when it finally becomes too much?
Who do we become in the space that opens?
In Holding On, those questions lived in a hospice room where breath, not clocks, set the rhythm. In Maggie B.’s world, they hid in WI minutes and biscuit tins, asking who gets to decide when a moment is officially over. And in my essays and standalone story, they surfaced in unexpected places: phone drafts, unfinished scarves, airport queues, and the truth-telling tenderness of a poem written for a family you’ll likely never meet.
Across all these pieces, the themes tightened around each other like threads pulled into a single weave:
The cost of silence — and its usefulness
The weight of showing up — and the grace in showing up late
Unfinished things that refuse to disappear
Love as labour, boundary, inheritance, and defiance
The way small gestures hold what big explanations can’t
Here’s how the work unfolded while everything around it kept moving:
Short Stories & Poetry
Written for a HARK-ALS event, this poem honours a caregiver’s paradox: the unbearable heaviness of loving someone whose body is failing, and the unbearable lightness of the moments that still break through — like a simple car ride without machinery.
(Grief as devotion. Kindness as architecture.)
A man clearing an old phone discovers thirty-seven unsent drafts to the woman he once diminished himself for. What follows is less a confession than a quiet reclamation: the moment he realises he had already chosen himself — he just couldn’t yet name it.
(Silence as boundary. Memory as compass.)
Holding On
A rare pause: hospice coffee, a corridor wander with Emma, and a conversation where Rachel and David stop circling each other and finally stand still. A chapter about soft repair — the kind that happens not because two people agree, but because they’re tired of hurting alone.
(Repair in motion. Presence as practice.)
The room contracts to two: Ralph asleep, David awake. A night of quiet vigilance where the son who fled slowly becomes the son who stays. When Ralph cries out for Lily and David must speak the truth of her death back into the room, something in him steadies.
(Witnessing as love. Staying as courage.)
Morning returns sharper. David is already at the hospice with a notebook full of questions for Dr. Patel, a small shift with huge emotional gravity. This is the chapter where “you handle it” becomes “we’ll handle it,” a pivot that redefines the siblings’ grief architecture.
(Shared burden. New footing.)
The Maggie B. Casefiles
A WI adjournment written after the fact sparks procedural chaos. Maggie observes, records, and quietly writes the real version — proof that lateness doesn’t invalidate truth.
(Timing as narrative. Accuracy as kindness.)
When Maggie’s metaphors for WI leadership leak into public view, Audrey attempts to regulate “unofficial commentary.” The village responds with Sharpies, shortbread, and an irrepressible sense of humour.
(Resistance via confectionery. Story as ecosystem.)
A scarf keeps migrating around the village, unfinished and slightly altered each time it returns. Maggie tracks its journey, discovering that some things stay alive precisely because no one tries to complete them.
(Unfinished ≠ abandoned. Care through continuation.)
At an airport — jet-lagged, observant — Maggie witnesses a woman quietly choose a different life in a single moment. A story about pivot points, readiness, and the choices we rehearse long before we make them.
(Turning without spectacle. Agency in the small.)
Six Weeks, One Through-Line
Across grief rooms, village halls, poems, corridors, airports, and late-night revisions, one truth kept resurfacing:
You can’t stop the world from turning —
but you can choose the places where your attention lands.
And that choice, repeated quietly, becomes its own kind of return.