Half-Doses
It's just water, just light on water, but I can feel the temperature of it. Can almost hear it...
The glass catches light at the highway exit and I almost miss the turn. For three, maybe four seconds, the storefront window stops being a window and becomes something else. A line, like a distant shore. A horizon. Something my body recognizes before my brain can name it.
Then it’s glass again. Tired glass. Glass with soap residue and a HELP WANTED sign peeling at the corner.
But those three seconds stay in my throat like a held breath.
I make the turn. Eighteen minutes now.
The heat sits on the pavement like a living thing but I choose to walk anyway. I park four blocks from work because parking costs $32 and walking is free. My shirt sticks to my back after just one block. Thirteen minutes. My shift starts at 3:30—a number chosen by software that optimizes labor costs down to the minute. I tell myself I can make it if I don’t stop. If I keep the pace I’ve been keeping all day, all week, all year. The pace that feels like motion but is really just captivity with scenery.
Then I see the gallery.
I’ve walked this block a hundred times. The trees unchanged, the uneven pavement remembering every footfall. Maybe I noticed it before the way you notice things you’ve already decided you don’t have time for. The door is propped open with a red brick. The lights are on inside. A small municipal space, the kind kept alive by grants the current administration wants to cut. The air from inside smells different than the street—cooler, chemical. Paint and lemon cleaner, and something else I can’t name, like paper left too long in the rain.
I tell myself I’m just getting out of the heat.
I tell myself five minutes won’t matter.
I tell myself lies I don’t believe because I’m already walking through the door, already stepping into that different air, already betraying the clock.
3:21.
The room is smaller than it looked from outside. White walls, scuffed floor, track lighting that hums. Empty except for me and a woman in a security uniform sitting in a folding chair in the back corner, away from the front door. She has a sandwich in her lap, still half-wrapped in white paper from the grocery store deli. Turkey, maybe ham. She glances up, when I enter, still chewing, then back down.
The transaction is clear: I’m allowed here. She’s not going to ask me anything.
On the far wall, a photograph of water holds the room still.
Not a famous coastline. Not the kind that appears in travel magazines or motivational posters promising ADVENTURE or FIND YOURSELF. Just water—though the kind that feels like you’ve stood at its edge once before and lost the name of the place. But now someone looked at it with patience that lets the eye map small currents. The way we used to look before we learned to measure experience by what it costs to have it. And looking at it, I remember the exact ache of wanting a life I’ve never lived.
The photograph is large, maybe four feet across, mounted behind glass. The light in it is afternoon light, the same light that’s happening right now outside. The same light that caught the storefront window and almost made me miss the turn.
I stand in front of it and something unlatches. A door I didn’t know I’d been holding shut.
Not happiness, which is a currency we no longer earn. Something older than happiness. The body remembering what it knew before. My daughters—I looked at them this way once. The first time I saw them. Before the calculating started. Before daycare costs, formula costs, the bedroom we didn’t have, the promotion I’d need, the years it would take. For the first two days after they were born, I looked without measuring. Their tiny fingers grasping at air.
This is like that. Like that first stunned looking.
I don’t know how long I stand there. The minutes misbehave. The photograph is just water—light stitched across its surface—but I feel the cool of it rising toward me. As if air were leaking through the frame.
I almost hear it.
I lean closer, and my reflection ghosts itself over the waves.
For a moment, I am inside the glass—back to those days before time had a price on it.
My face, the water, the light trembling on one shared skin. Then, for a breath-long beat, a crack flickers through me. Quiet. Certain. Insisting it’s been there for years—waiting for someone to notice.
“You can take your time.”
I turn. The security guard is looking at me now, or maybe not quite at me—at the photograph, or at something beyond both of us. Her voice is quiet. It costs her something to say it, I can tell. Permission neither of us can afford.
“I have to be at work,” I say.
“I figured,” she says.
We look at each other for a moment. There is a recognition here. A quiet, shapeless ache—too familiar to misread. She knows this hunger. I can see it in her face, in how she holds the sandwich after the first bite, wanting it to last. In why she works here—because at least this building has beauty, she can sit near it, inside of it, even if she must police others’ access to it for sixteen dollars an hour.
She looks back down at her sandwich. I have been given time I do not have.
My phone buzzes. A text from my manager: You close today right?
Yes, I type back. On my way.
3:29.
I should leave. I should already be running. But I turn back to the photograph and my legs refuse the command. There’s texture in the print I couldn’t see from further back—the fiber of the paper, the way the light reflects from it as a specific moment of light, a specific quality of air and water that will never happen again exactly this way.
A line from an old article, years ago, came to mind, half-remembered. Something about how we’re meant to want things, meant to see ourselves reflected in them. But the reflection requires a subscription fee. I couldn’t articulate it then. Can’t quite now. But standing here I understand it in my body: the wanting itself becomes the product. Not the artwork. Not the experience. The specifically shaped longing for a life where such things are possible.
I stay anyway.
3:34.
A bird flies into the window glass.
3:35.
3:36.
The numbers tick past on my phone screen and I watch them go. I am choosing this over the clock. I am choosing to be late. The knowledge sits in my stomach like a stone, like proof of something I cannot prove. I imagine my manager checking the schedule, looking at the door, the small tightening of her mouth. She is not unkind. She is also trapped.
3:38.
The security guard shifts in her chair but doesn’t speak. She has given me all the permission she can give.
I take out my phone and photograph the photograph—a pointless gesture, I know, but my thumb refuses to delete it. The image on my screen is nothing like the thing itself. But I need evidence. I need proof that this happened, that I stopped, that for these minutes I chose beauty over the lie that motion is freedom.
There’s a stack of postcards on a small table by the door. FREE, the hand-written sign says. TAKE ONE. I slide one into my pocket as I leave.
3:41.
I run the best I can, the remaining blocks to work. My breath comes hard—wishing for youth again, wishing for the lungs I had at twenty-five. The world narrows to the rhythm of my feet on pavement, the calculation already forming: what I’ll say, how I’ll explain, which lie will be believable. The bus broke down. My phone died and I didn’t see the time. Something true enough to pass, small enough not to matter.
I arrive at 3:52.
My manager is at the register. She looks up when I come through the door, and I see her see me—the sweat, the breathlessness, the guilt written all over my face.
“Sorry,” I say immediately. “The traffic—”
“It’s fine,” she cuts me off. Her voice is not unkind but like a surrender, “Just text next time, okay?”
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
She’s already looking back at the register. The moment has passed. I have been forgiven for a transgression I did not commit, which means the real transgression—the choice to stay with beauty, the choice to be late for something true—remains invisible, unpunished. It’s mine. My fingers tightening.
I clock in. I put on my apron. I smile at customers and ask how I can help them and move through the choreography I know so well my body does it without me. But the postcard is in my pocket. I can feel it there, a small hard rectangle pressed against my thigh. Evidence. Geography. A map to a place I cannot reach.
The shift passes the way shifts pass—in increments of task and transaction. A woman wants to know if we have this in blue. A man needs help with the app that never works. Someone’s card is declined and I watch their face do the thing faces do when money becomes visible, becomes a problem that everyone can see. I know that face. I’ve made that face.
At 4:47, I realize I haven’t eaten since breakfast.
At 5:15, I drink water from the bathroom tap.
At 5:52, my feet start hurting in the specific way that means they’ll hurt worse tomorrow.
At 6:30, I take my break.
In the bathroom I pull out the postcard. The coastline looks smaller here, flattened by the dim bathroom light, flickering like it’s deciding whether to stay. But the same water is the same. The same water where I was standing just a few hours ago. I hold it over the trash can. I think: This is what made me late. What paid for my lie.
I think of Sam, coming home early in the morning from the hospital, too exhausted to speak. I think of the $47 in checking until Friday. I think of the root canal I’m postponing and the plane ticket I’ll never buy and the choice between the self that stays alive and the self that stays awake.
Amputations that began long before I knew what being cut away felt like.
I put the postcard back in my pocket.
The second half of my shift is longer than the first. Time does something different when you’re tired. It stretches until the minutes feel thin enough to tear. At 7:03, someone spills a drink near the register and I clean it up. At 7:28, the music loops back to a song I’ve heard four times already today. At 7:45, I count register drawers while a man waits impatiently to ask a question I’ll have to answer by saying I don’t know.
At 8:15, I’m ready to close the doors. I clock out. I walk to my car. The parking lot is mostly empty now, the heat finally breaking. I sit in the driver’s seat with the engine off, watching the light die on the windshield. Just glass again. This time, refusing to change shape.
My phone buzzes. A text from the restaurant where I’m scheduled to be: Can you come in early? We’re slammed.
I stare at the message. I calculate: $160 if I go, maybe $180 with tips. The electric bill that’s due. The groceries we need. The distance between what I have and what I need, which never closes no matter how many shifts I work. The prescriptions I’m stretching by taking half because the bottle doesn’t know about the copay, about how insurance works, about the choice between medicine and groceries.
The arithmetic of my life.
I text Sam: Can we afford for me to skip tonight?
The three dots appear, then disappear. Appear again. I watch them pulse on the screen like a heartbeat.
No.
I wait.
Do it anyway.
I sit with this for a long moment. The permission and the impossibility of it. Then I start the car. I pull out of the parking lot. But I don’t turn toward the restaurant. I turn toward home. Toward a few hours with Sam and the girls. Before Sam’s shift starts. Before the girls fall asleep.
The drive takes about an hour. The same streets I always take. Tailgating along with all of the others leaving the city.
Sam is in the kitchen when I get home. Standing at the stove with a wooden spoon, stirring something that smells like garlic and tomatoes. The good smell of food being made, not purchased. Sam turns when I come in and doesn’t say anything, just looks at me.
“I didn’t go,” I say.
“I know.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“I know that too.”
Sam turns back to the stove. I stand there in the doorway with my hand still on my keys, still holding them like I might turn around and leave again. Like I might still make the practical choice.
“Come eat,” Sam says.
“And the girls?”
“They were unraveling. I gave them a bath. It calmed them down and they fell asleep shortly after.”
I put my keys down. I take off my shoes—the cheap ones that hurt my feet, the ones I’ll have to replace soon but can’t yet. I sit at the table. The same table where we eat every meal. The same table where we’ve sat across from each other countless times, too tired to talk, just going through the motions in the same space.
Sam puts a plate in front of me. Rigatoni with the tomato sauce, bread on the side. Not fancy. Just food. Ordinary. Warm. But Sam made it. Sam’s tired, patient hands, and that means something.
“I saw something today,” I say.
Sam sits down across from me. “Yeah?”
“A photograph. In a gallery I’ve walked past a hundred times.”
“What was it?”
“Just water. Just light on water.”
Sam nods. Doesn’t ask why that matters. I’m disappointed that he didn’t ask. Doesn’t ask why I was late, why I skipped the shift, why I’m sitting here instead of there. Just nods and starts eating.
We eat in silence. Not the exhausted silence of people who have nothing left to say, but something else. Something that feels like it has space inside it, like the breath before a question.
After dinner, Sam has to get ready for work. I do the dishes. The water runs hot, then cold, then hot again—the water heater cycling the way it always does. I watch my hands in the water, watch the soap, watch the way the light from the overhead fixture catches the bubbles. It’s not beautiful. It’s just dishes. But I’m looking at it, and it feels like it is enough for once. I’m looking at it the way I looked at the photograph.
Sam comes out dressed for the hospital. Scrubs, the green ones. Hair pulled back. The look on Sam’s face means the next twelve hours will be hard.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I will be.”
“I’m sorry about tonight. The money.”
Sam stops at the door. Looks at me. Walks toward me and pulls me close. “Don’t be sorry. Be here when I get back.”
Then Sam’s gone.
I’m alone in the apartment. The two-bedroom with corners that don’t align. The place we’ve lived for three years because we can’t afford to move and can’t afford to stay. The walls are thin. Sometimes I can hear the neighbor’s TV, the couple upstairs arguing about something I can’t make out.
I check on the twins. I sit on the couch. Pull out the postcard. Look at it again.
It’s just a postcard. Just an image of water and light, mass-produced, probably printed a thousand times. It’s not the real thing. It’s not even close to the real thing. But it holds the shape of it. It’s proof that for a time today, I stopped calculating. I just looked.
The apartment is quiet. Outside, I can hear a cat. Someone’s car alarm going off. The ambient sound of streets that never actually sleeps, just pretend to for a few hours.
I get up. Go to the bedroom. Open the drawer where I keep the pill bottle. Take out one tablet and hold it in my palm. White, round, scored down the middle—designed to be broken if you need to. I get the kitchen knife. Press the blade into the score line. The pill splits unevenly. One piece larger than the other. I take the smaller piece and put the larger one back in the bottle for tomorrow.
This is how I make it last.
I swallow the half tablet with water from the tap. The chalky taste lingers. I rinse my mouth. Swallow again.
Half-doses.
It’s 11:47 when I finally lie down. Sam won’t be home until morning. I might still be asleep by then if the girls let me. Sam will probably be too tired, and we’ll wake up tomorrow and do it all again. The same shifts. The same calculations. The same slow hemorrhage of hours exchanged for dollars that are already spent.
But tonight, before I sleep, I think about the photograph. About the water. About the light. About Sam, who said Do it anyway, even though the math doesn’t work. About the rigatoni he cooked for me.
The postcard sits on the nightstand now. I can see the outline in the dark. Just a rectangle. Just paper. But it holds something. A moment. A choice. Evidence that I stopped.
Not because I believe I will get there. But because the part of me that knows it exists is the part of me that has not yet been taken.
And that, for now, is enough.
Not to live on.
But to stay awake with.
Luciano Conte, born in Formia, Italy, roots himself in tactile arts like film photography, painting, bread baking, and house building. He writes in order to probe those persistent, buried forces that shape us from beneath the surface. For him, silence is not absence but presence: a pause that resonates the loudest, like the pause in a conversation that carries more weight than words. He speaks his lines aloud while writing, tying rhythm to breath, making language a living, physical act where sound and sense fuse, just as photography captures light and shadow. He urges readers to read his work aloud to unlock layers that silent reading misses, letting the cadence shape the experience in the same way as kneading dough or laying foundation stones, where each gesture is deliberate and consequential.
If you enjoyed this post, hit the ♡ to let us know.
If it gave you any thoughts, please leave a comment.
If you think others would enjoy it, hit re-stack or share:
If you’d like to read more:
And if you’d like to help create more Juke, upgrade to a paid subscription (same button above). Otherwise, you can always help with a one-time donation via Paypal or Venmo.
 | A guest post by
|
A desperate life with a touch of beauty. The metaphors are dazzling.
achingly beautiful writing.