For the man she wants me to be.
For the quiet, stubborn part of me that still wants to make something beautiful out of scrap and fire and time.
I pull my jacket tighter and head for the subway, carrying all of the emotions with me, which feel like a vice around my neck. We can’t go on like this.
When I arrive at the workshop, my body warms as the smell of heat, iron and old oil fill my nostrils. It’s like a punch in the face the second I push open the door, it’s sharp, dirty, and alive. In my peripheral, sparks flicker in the back like restless stars. The air crackles with machines and effort and something almost holy: creation born from pressure. I breathe it in like a tonic to my soul.
“Hey Leo, ready to get to work?” Ed, the owner of the workshop says as he walks over from his work station.
“Always,” I say, grinning, and he slaps me on the back before leaving me to get on with it.
I drop my bag to the floor, remove my jacket and hang it on the coatstand in the corner. From the workbench I pull on gloves that are stiff with past mistakes,damaged with burns I don’t regret. The world narrows to the workbench, the tools laid out like familiar bones.
Metal waits for me. Cold at first. Heavy and full of potential.
When I strike it, the sound rings and vibrates intensely up my arms and settles into my chest. Each blow shudders through me, steadying something that’s been shaking all day. The heat blooms, orange and dangerous, licking the edges of control. Sweat gathers at the back of my neck and on my forehead. This is where my body makes sense. At the hotel, I’m careful. Small. Replaceable. A fucking nobody.
Here, I am a fulfilled person. A creator.
I shape the metal slowly, deliberate movement, coaxing curves from resistance. Every scar on my hands tells a story Sarah never wanted to hear. Every dent in the table is proof that I once tried to make something that would outlast me.
I close my eyes for a moment, and listen to the hiss of cooling steel, the low thunder of distant machinery. Nostalgia hits as I think back to when my dad used to bring me to places like this.
Not workshops exactly, but garages, scrapyards, forgotten corners of the town where broken things went to wait to be reinvented. He’d hand me rusted bolts and bent nails like they were treasure.
“You can make anything,” he used to say. “You just have to see what it wants to become.”
I swallow, holding back the hurt that he’s gone. He’s been gone over a year, but sometimes I still reach for myphone to call him when the world feels too loud. He would’ve loved this place. The mess of it. The stubbornness of it.
Sarah used to love him too, before she realized just how much I was like him. How much passion I had for something she looked down her nose at as pointless. Before my dad died she visited less and less, preferring to spend her spare time on social media, and creating pinterest boards of the perfect life she envisioned.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment she changed from the easygoing, free spirited girl she was to this money and status obsessed stranger. I think seeing her friends leaving our town and moving on to better things stirred something in her. She would often mention them and show me their social media, comparing what she had to them, and talked about “security” like it was oxygen. Constant speeches about “moving up,” and how love doesn’t pay rent.
I strike the metal again, harder this time. Every impact chips away another part of the stress I carry from the day. It’s stripped me back to the person I am.
I really don’t want to go home. Not to the silence that judges me. Not to the way she looks at me like I’m an unfinished project that’s already taking too long to complete.
Here, no one asks me what I’m worth. They just let me make something.
I study the shape forming under my hands — rough, imperfect and permanent. Beautiful. I want a life that feels like this.
Earned.
Hot.
Mine.
Maybe I can’t save my marriage. Maybe I shouldn’t try to turn myself into someone else just to be tolerated. If I put the work in, I can do well at the hotel. I can learn. I can move up. I can survive.
And somewhere between surviving and sculpting, maybe I can find happiness that doesn’t kill a part of myself that’s in my DNA.
Removing my gloves, I wipe my hands on my jeans and stare at the glowing metal, heart pumping fast but steady.
For the first time in weeks, the future doesn’t feel like a jump off a cliff into the unknown.
It feels like something waiting to be shaped.
CHAPTER 5 - ETHAN
