My Body as a Tiny Coastal Town
I live in a small town, and the town is my body. Population: one, plus a few permanent residents who don't pay rent. It runs on its own logic, and after years here I've stopped fighting the local ways and mostly just live by them.
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The power goes out for no reason. No storm, no warning, just a flicker and then the lights of the place drop to half. The energy company offers no explanation and no estimated restore time. You learn to keep a flashlight handy and a blanket nearby, because the outages come when they come and last as long as they last.
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There's one road in and out, and some days it's closed. The fog rolls over it and visibility drops to nothing, or a flare washes it out entirely, and the whole town is cut off until conditions clear. On those days nothing leaves and nothing arrives. The town just waits, quiet, for the road to open back up.
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The diner runs on strange hours and is the heart of the place anyway. That's the couch, really, the one reliable spot, open when everything else is shut, always with a seat for me. The coffee's nothing special. It's where I end up on every kind of day, and the town would not be livable without it.
The power goes out for no reason. No storm, no warning, just a flicker and then the lights of the place drop to half. The energy company offers no explanation and no estimated restore time. You learn to keep a flashlight handy and a blanket nearby, because the outages come when they come and last as long as they last.
There's one road in and out, and some days it's closed. The fog rolls over it and visibility drops to nothing, or a flare washes it out entirely, and the whole town is cut off until conditions clear. On those days nothing leaves and nothing arrives. The town just waits, quiet, for the road to open back up.
Everything closes early. The town keeps short hours and makes no apology for it. By a certain point in the afternoon the shutters come down, the open signs flip, and whatever you didn't get done is going to keep until tomorrow, because the town is done, regardless of your plans.
The diner runs on strange hours and is the heart of the place anyway. That's the couch, really, the one reliable spot, open when everything else is shut, always with a seat for me. The coffee's nothing special. It's where I end up on every kind of day, and the town would not be livable without it.
And the weather runs everything. Not the mayor, not the schedule, not my best intentions. The weather decides whether the power holds, whether the road's open, whether the town has a good day or a closed one. I used to resent that. Now I just check the sky when I wake up, the way the locals do, and plan the day around what the weather will allow.
It's a strange little town. The infrastructure is unreliable and the hours are short and the one road floods. But it's mine, the only one I've got, and on the clear days, when the power holds and the road is open and the diner's warm, there is nowhere I would rather live.