Chez Moi

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Chez moi, the roads pretend not to be roads. Hedges lean in like they’re trying to keep a secret, tarmac narrows into a suggestion, and you only know it’s legal to drive there because someone more optimistic left tyre tracks before you. This is where my day slips when I should be driving home. The lanes that scrape both mirrors, the lay-bys waiting longer for a camera than a council truck.

Chez moi, you don’t drop a pin. You say, “You know that corner with the broken fence and the one perfect tree.” If they know, they know.

Inside looks unremarkable on paper: no TV, one kettle, too many mugs, a ridiculous loyalty to a fountain pen that will definitely outlive me, and a camera that cost more than a sensible car, pointed mostly at things no one asked to see. Music on low, always. The same songs looping until they stop being background noise and start being furniture.

I come from all of this — the long roads, the slow kettles, the songs on repeat, the things I feel more than I announce.

The ghosts here are ordinary.

Old colleagues whose names still land in my throat before my hands remember they don’t live in my phone anymore. People I knew for ten minutes who left heavier footprints than people I’ve known for ten years. Parents from that era where being “in touch” meant “see you at dinner unless it’s serious,” and somehow everyone survived school, heartbreak, and entire days without narrating lunch to each other.

I remember being unreachable without it being a crisis.

I remember carrying a joke all day so I could land it once.

The people who’ve left — some gently, some violently, some without explanation — all sit somewhere between the hedges and the hard drives. I don’t visit on command, and I don’t package them into speeches. Now and then, mid-drive, mid-song, mid-silence, there they are: the ones who didn’t get enough photos, the ones who said one raw thing and disappeared, the ones whose families chose privacy over public statement. Not haunting. Just—present. On their own terms.

I come from all of this — the almosts, the silences, the unsent texts, the stories I won’t overwrite.

It isn’t radical—just out of step enough to raise eyebrows.

No social media, because I’d rather not rent out my attention by the hour.

No TV, because if something’s going to talk at me all evening it can at least be a song I chose.

Dates are walk-and-talk, not sit-and-scroll pretending it’s chemistry.

I read the small print. I like questions that don’t fit in a box. I believe there’s a difference between vulnerability and performing misery for applause.

Call it traditional, call it awkward. I’m not trying to be difficult; I’m just not auditioning.

Chez moi, we count our wealth in what doesn’t exist online: the conversation that stayed in the room, the photograph that never left the print lab, the Sunday nobody documented properly because they were too busy living it. Nothing extraordinary, just small refusals. Quiet edits to the default settings.

I come from all of this — from choosing the long way round, from meaning what I say even if I don’t say much, from taking care where it doesn’t clickbait well.

Not lost—just not on show.

And then there’s the box of negatives, literal and otherwise. Photos that never became prints. Moments that were fine as they were but wouldn’t survive framing. People I liked who were never mine, and people who thought I was theirs until we both admitted otherwise.

I used to think ‘undeveloped’ meant ‘unfinished’. Now I think it sometimes just means “not for display.”

The dead don’t line my walls; they sit quietly in the archive, showing up in the way I drive, the way I listen, the way I don’t joke about certain things. The past arguments, the nearly relationships, the messages I decided not to send — they’re all in there too, marked “keep,” not “exhibit.”

Now and then, one of them catches the light and I see it properly. A song hits differently. A road looks like it did five years ago. A sentence I almost texted feels heavier than the one I chose. That’s enough. They’re not lost. They’re just not on show.

I come from all of this — from what I remember, what I respect by leaving alone, and what I refuse to turn into content.

If home is what holds the room together, the playlist is what remembers why.

This is the first in a small series. Next up: Diary on Repeat, Fed by the Fridge, and The Quiet Click.