Poetry & Short Form · Digital book

The Upkeep

By Sikho

Everyone is maintaining something — a body, a marriage, a skill, a bridge, an institution, a friendship, a self — and almost nobody has the vocabulary for it, because every incentive in modern life rewards the new over the sustained. 'The Upkeep' is a collection of fifteen connected essays that take the maintenance mindset, a concept first named by historians of technology studying bridges and software, and apply it everywhere a life actually runs: the marriage held together by thousands of small, unglamorous 'bids for connection' rather than grand gestures; the household mental load that falls disproportionately on one person, now measured at a twenty-six-point gender gap; the surgeon whose hands measurably lose their edge within a month of not operating; the local newsroom that dies not in a scandal but in a slow, unvoted defunding; the friendship that survives on nothing but two people's ongoing willingness to keep reaching out; the grief that isn't a stage to complete but a relationship that now requires active tending from only one side. Grounded throughout in named research — the Gottmans' decades of marriage data, Arlie Hochschild's second shift, Richard Sennett's craftsman, the real 2007 I-35W bridge collapse and the 2022 Fern Hollow collapse that followed the same arithmetic fifteen years later — this is a book for anyone who has ever wondered why the boring, recurring work of keeping something alive gets so little credit, right up until the day it stops happening and everyone agrees, with real conviction, to call the failure sudden.

150 minutes estimated reading

Access, enrollment and any payment are managed by Sikho. Check the current price and availability there. This title is not included in NyzaStore membership.