These fictional stories were written for me, exploring themes I love. They are a reflection of me and my experiences. Gemini generated these based on the source material provided earlier. Here's some accompanying music - open in Spotify to take it with you:
You receive an official letter in the post. The sender is "The Bureau of Emotional Equity." The letter states, in a tone of friendly bureaucracy, that due to the sudden and unilateral termination of your marriage, a significant amount of "undirected emotional capital" has been placed in escrow by the state. You are summoned to claim your assets.
The Bureau's office feels like a cross between a post office and a lost-and-found. The clerk behind the counter explains the situation. Every deep relationship, she says, generates a quantifiable "emotional charge." When a relationship ends mutually, this charge dissipates naturally. But in cases of sudden abandonment or betrayal, the jilted party's invested love, trust, and future plans become a form of psychic surplus.
The Bureau's job is to collect this "remaindered love" and hold it until the individual is ready to process it. A file with your name on it is placed on the counter. It is surprisingly heavy.
You are given three options:
You ask about Option C. The clerk gives you a cautionary look. "It doesn't punish the other party," she explains. "It simply delivers the full weight of the love and trust they discarded, all at once. It's like an emotional tidal wave. Most people aren't equipped to handle that."
You think of Eeva. Not with anger, but with a strange, sad pity. You think of her running, her inability to face the pain she caused.
You choose Option C. Not as an act of revenge, but as a final, radical act of honesty. You want her to feel, just for a moment, the reality of what she threw away.
The story ends in two scenes.
First, we see you walking out of the Bureau, feeling not empty, but balanced. A ledger has been cleared.
Then, we cut to Eeva. She is in her perfect new home with her new partner. Suddenly, for no reason at all, an overwhelming, crushing wave of emotion washes over her: every good moment you shared, every private joke, every promise, every ounce of the unwavering trust you had placed in her. It is not an accusation. It is simply a presence. It lasts only a minute, but it leaves her breathless and sobbing, finally forced to face the ghost she had been so desperately outrunning.
You receive an email from a sender you don't recognize. It's from a young family who bought the house you and Eeva once shared. The tone of the message is uneasy, almost ashamed. They say there's something... strange about the house.
"I don't know how to explain it better," the mother writes. "But the house has moods. Sometimes, when my husband and I argue, the rooms turn freezing cold. Doors lock by themselves. And sometimes at night, if you listen closely, you can almost hear a faint, disappointed sigh coming from the walls."
They've called in plumbers, electricians, and even a mold-sniffing dog. Nothing wrong has been found. As a last resort, they reached out to you. Perhaps you know something about the house's history?
You feel a familiar anxiety rise in your throat. You remember that last year in the house: the oppressive, unspoken atmosphere, the feeling of being trapped, your partner's silent internal monologue that you never heard but could feel like electricity in the air.
You agree to drive out to the old town.
The moment you step inside, you feel it. A heavy, expectant energy. The house is like a giant magnetic tape that has recorded the final, toxic months of your marriage. It's the ghost of your relationship left behind.
You walk through the house, and it reacts to you. The lights flicker. The thermostat goes haywire. You hear footsteps upstairs, even though you know the house is empty. The house remembers you. It remembers everything that was left unsaid.
You realize what you have to do. This house doesn't need an exorcist. It needs couple's therapy.
You start in the living room. You speak to the empty walls. You speak louder and more honestly than you ever spoke to Eeva within these walls. You talk about your fears, your insecurities, your feeling of not being enough. You admit your own part in the death of the relationship. You walk to the bedroom and you forgive; not Eeva, but yourself. You apologize to the house for filling it with so much unshed sorrow.
Finally, you stand in the entryway, the place where you felt the most trapped.
"It's over now," you say, softly but firmly. "You don't have to carry this anymore. We've both been set free. You can let go, too."
At that moment, the front door, which had been shut tight, slowly creaks open on its own. A warm breeze sweeps through the hall. The oppressive feeling is gone.
You've heard whispers of a place called "The Distillery." A bar you can't find unless you know what you're looking for. One evening, an old acquaintance gives you the address.
The place is small and dim. The bartender is an old man who seems to hold the history of the world in his eyes. The drink menu is strange. It doesn't list "whisky" or "gin." It lists "First Kiss, 1988." "Graduation, 2001." "A Perfect Summer Day at the Cabin."
The bartender explains the concept. He is a distiller of memories. He can take a client's living memory and distill it into a single, perfect serving. When you drink it, you don't just remember the event. You are there. You feel everything exactly as you felt it then.
You try it cautiously. You order "The Birth of My Child, 2004." The glass contains a clear, warm liquid. One sip, and you are in the delivery room, holding your little Eila in your arms, your heart bursting with indescribable love and fear. The experience is intoxicating.
You become a regular. You relive the best moments of your life. But then, curiosity and your persistent need to understand everything drive you deeper. You decide to confront the darkness.
"One 'Fist of Youth,' please," you say one night.
The bartender looks at you for a long moment and nods. The drink is dark and fiery. One sip, and you are 17 years old, drunk, filled with uncontrollable rage. You feel the force of the punch in your own hand, the impact, the ensuing emptiness and shame. The experience is raw and terrible. When you return to your barstool, you are sober, but trembling.
You understand the true power of this place. This is the ultimate form of therapy. You begin to systematically go through the painful points of your life, like a morbid tasting menu. You order "The Moment of Betrayal," "The Last Words of the Breakup," "The Phone Call About My Brother." Each drink is painful, but from the stability of your present self, you can observe the memory without it overwhelming you. You are in the movie theater of your own life, watching the most difficult scenes.
Finally, you have been through it all. You have faced every demon. You walk up to the bar for the last time.
"What can I get for you?" the bartender asks. "The usual trauma?"
You shake your head.
"No," you say. "Tonight, I'll have a glass of this moment. Just as it is."
The bartender smiles for the first time. It's a warm, genuine smile.
"That doesn't need to be distilled," he says. "You already have it."
You are awake. It's not unusual. You aren't anxious, nor are you tossing and turning in agony. You are just... awake. Your mind is going through the day's events, organizing conversations, processing emotions. You think of it as insomnia, a byproduct of an overstimulated nervous system.
You don't know that five floors below your apartment, in an old bomb shelter, lies the "Dreamnet" control center. It's a secret unit tasked with monitoring and balancing the city's collective subconscious during its most fragile hours, during REM sleep. They prevent mass nightmares, curb waves of psychic disturbances, and ensure that the city wakes up in the morning at least relatively sane.
Tonight, they have an emergency. A powerful, chaotic "nightmare node" has formed in the network, threatening to bring down the entire system. It feeds on the city's latent anxiety and is growing uncontrollable.
"We need an anchor!" the control room chief commands. "Find an active 'Conscious Dream-binder'. Now!"
The system scans the sleeping city. It's searching for a rare combination: an awake, conscious mind with high empathic resonance, processed trauma, and a stable, earned sense of fundamental security. It finds one. You.
There are only a handful of people like you. You are, unknowingly, the natural filters of the Dreamnet. When you are awake at night in a calm, conscious state, your mind acts as a firewall, grounding the surrounding psychic noise.
In the control room, technicians divert the dangerous nightmare node to your "sector."
In your apartment, you feel a sudden, inexplicable wave of anxiety. A familiar old feeling, but diluted. You dismiss it with a shrug, get out of bed, and go to the kitchen to boil water for tea. You focus on the quiet hum of the kettle and the way the streetlight draws a square on the kitchen floor.
This simple, grounding act is, on a psychic level, a massive defensive maneuver. You are unknowingly "censoring" the nightmare: breaking its chaotic energy into small, meaningless pieces by concentrating on reality.
In the control room, the red emergency lights go out. The system is stable.
"He handled it," the chief sighs in relief.
"Who even is he?" asks a new trainee.
The chief looks at your profile on the monitor: a middle-aged, divorced man, on cholesterol medication, currently contemplating between rooibos and chamomile.
"He's the most important night watchman in the city," the chief says. "And he has no idea."
You sip your tea and look out into the darkness. The anxiety has passed. The lonely moment feels peaceful. You don't know that you've just won a battle for the soul of the sleeping city.
The room is filled with servers, old hard drives, and a strange, quiet sorrow. Your profession is a rare one. You are a "digital archaeologist," an "archivist of lost voices." People send you the old computers and phones of their deceased loved ones, and you find them in there.
It started by chance. While helping a friend's family recover photos from a broken computer, you found fragmented audio recordings, snippets of video calls, forgotten chat logs. You compiled them into a short audio collage - a collection of your late friend's laughter, his way of saying "well now," his reflections on life. The effect on the family was immense. It was like a final, unexpected letter.
You founded a small, discreet service called "Echo." Your work is half hacking, half soul care. You dig through digital sand, searching for the essence of a person amidst the data. You don't create anything new with artificial intelligence; instead, you curate an authentic memory from existing pieces: a soundscape from a childhood home, a video compilation of a father's bad jokes, a poem of text messages where a mother always reminded them to take their vitamins.
Your work has brought comfort to hundreds. You have given a voice to those who can no longer speak.
One Tuesday, you receive a package. Inside is an old, scratched laptop and a short message: "This was my brother's. He died years ago. I could never bring myself to go through his things. Maybe you can find him."
You turn on the machine. A username appears on the screen, and your heart skips a beat. It's your brother's name. The brother you lost to drugs so long ago. You have searched through the losses of others but never dared to confront your own.
You sit in your studio, which is suddenly too quiet. You put on your headphones, your finger resting on the mouse. There it is, the first recovered audio file, dated two weeks before his death. You take a deep breath and press play. You are no longer an archivist searching for data. You are a brother, finally ready to listen. And from amidst all the noise, you hear it: an echo.
You find weekends difficult. Loneliness is a quiet, but heavy guest. Eila sees it too, and it breaks her heart. She knows you tend to carry your burdens alone, hating the thought of being a bother.
She decides to build a bridge for you, with her own tools.
One day, she installs an app she made herself onto your phone. It's simple. On the screen is a small, rock-like creature - your personal avatar.
"This is an emotion interpreter," Eila explains. "When you're feeling awful, but can't find the words, open this. You can just tell it how you feel, and it will change its expression and color to match your emotional state."
The avatar has one hidden feature. A small, discreet button.
"If you're in a really bad place," Eila says, "press that. It doesn't do anything special."
One Saturday evening, anxiety hits. You open the app and press the button.
A minute later, your phone rings. It's Eila.
"Hey," she says gently. "Your rock-buddy sent a message that you could use some company. What's up?"
Your youngest son, Alvar, now 14, is with you for the weekend. He is quieter than before. He has a new, strange hobby: he walks around with a sensitive microphone in his hand, recording "empty" spaces. He says he's collecting echoes. "If you listen carefully, you can hear everything that has happened in a room," he explains. You see it as his way of processing the divorce and the move, artistic and sensitive, as Alvar has always been.
This weekend, he has a special request. He wants to visit your old home in Nurmes. The house where you lived with Venla in Alvar's youth. The house has been sold, but Alvar just wants to record its sounds from the garden. You agree.
As you drive to Nurmes, memories wash over you. You park the car on the side of the road and watch as Alvar sets up his microphone on a stand, pointing it towards the living room window. He puts on his headphones and closes his eyes. You stand there, feeling the weight of 17 years on your shoulders.
In the evening, at your apartment, Alvar wants to play the recording for you. At first, you only hear the hum of the wind and the sound of a distant car. Then Alvar starts adjusting frequencies on his laptop, filtering the noise and amplifying certain parts of the soundscape.
And then you hear it.
As if from another room, from behind time's thin veil, you hear ghostly fragments. A baby's cry that you recognize as Alvar's voice. A heated, muffled argument between you and Venla in the kitchen. And then, chillingly, you hear your own father's drunken mumbling on the phone from years ago. And beneath it, barely audible, the suppressed sob of your younger self.
The house had remembered everything. It was an auditory tomb of your life together.
You look at your son, who is staring intently at his computer screen. You understand everything with crystal clarity. This isn't a hobby. Alvar's neurodivergence isn't just about silence and attentiveness. In fact, it's an ability. He can hear the emotional residue of places. He hasn't been distant; he has been overwhelmed, buried under all these echoes. By recording and filtering, he is trying to understand the chaos that you adults left behind.
You go to his side. You say nothing. You put on a second pair of headphones, and for the first time, you listen to the ghosts of the past together. No longer as frightening secrets, but as a shared story that you can finally lay to rest.
Your life is in a good place. You are at peace. But some small, persistent sliver of sadness has remained in the back of your mind. A feeling that a piece of the puzzle is still missing. You have analyzed your past down to its atoms, but you are still not completely whole.
Miro, now in his early twenties and studying information systems science, is visiting. He's excited about his own project: he's trying to map all of human behavior into a flowchart. It's his way of understanding the confusing neurotypical world. "IF-THEN statements, feedback loops, conditional clauses," he explains enthusiastically.
He asks if he can use your life as test data. You agree, amused. For hours, you tell him your story, and Miro types it into his system.
IF [Threat of Relationship End] THEN [Communication = FALSE].Then you get to the final years with Eeva. Miro furrows his brow and stops.
"This isn't logical," he says, pointing at the screen. "Based on all previous data, the correct function would have been [Initiate Separation Process]. You felt trapped, you had a safety-net job. Instead, you initiated a [Stasis Loop] and waited for an external stimulus. Why?"
You try to explain to him the complexities of emotion: hope, fear of failure, the terror of being alone.
Miro listens attentively. Then he looks at you, not with judgment, but with pure analysis.
"So you were afraid to execute a program with a high probability of success - achieving peace - because you feared the short-term emotional cost of shutting down the old, faulty program?"
That's the moment. When you hear your own emotional paralysis described so coldly, so logically, so completely without shame or guilt, something inside you clicks. It wasn't a deep, tragic knot in the soul. It was a bug. A simple, stupid error in the code.
A laugh rises from your belly, a deep and liberating laugh that eventually turns to tears. Miro's logic has done what no amount of emotional self-reflection could: it has given you the distance to see your own pitfall without guilt.
You hug your son, who looks at you, slightly bewildered.
"Thank you, Miro," you say. "I think you just ran the final debug for me."
It's an ordinary Tuesday. Gray and rainy. You are sitting in your apartment in Helsinki, reading a book, and you feel that familiar, steady peace you have learned to build. There is no anxiety, but no particular joy either. There is only being.
Then, without any warning, something changes.
It begins like a warm breeze in a closed room. A sudden, inexplicable, and utterly pure feeling of well-being spreads over your mind. It's not euphoria. It's something much more down-to-earth: the feeling of stepping out of a hot sauna onto a cottage porch to cool down. It's the scent of grilled food and birch leaves, the sound of distant laughter from the lake shore, and the feeling that for a moment, everything is perfectly uncomplicated and well.
The feeling is so strong and yet so foreign that you put your book down. You go through your thoughts: you haven't been reminiscing about anything particularly happy. You haven't received any good news. It's still raining outside. This feeling isn't coming from you. It's like a distant radio broadcast that your mind has accidentally picked up.
You wonder for a moment if there's an "Institute of Psycho-meteorology" that studies these weather fronts of the soul. A place where they would know that right now, over Helsinki, there is a transient, local high-pressure area of happiness.
The feeling lasts for about ten minutes and then it fades, leaving behind a serene and slightly bewildered state.
You forget the whole thing.
In the evening, your phone buzzes. It's a message from Minea. The message contains a single photo and a short text. In the photo, Minea, Eelis, their cousins, and Minea's boyfriend are gathered on a cottage dock. The sun is setting behind the lake, and on their faces is a genuine, relaxed joy after swimming and sauna.
The text below the picture reads: "Today was a really nice day. We were thinking of you. ❤️"
You look at the timestamp on the photo. It was taken at the exact time you felt that inexplicable wave of well-being.
You understand everything. You are no longer part of each other's daily lives, but you are still part of the same emotional climate. Their shared, uncomplicated joy - and the thought of you in that moment - had traveled a hundred kilometers and announced its existence on the weather radar of your soul.
You are not at their cottage, but you are still in their atmosphere. And that is enough. It is more than enough.
Feedback/more info: info (at) shouldertherapist.org
Regards, M.