Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
There are nights when my mind doesn’t so much think as it wanders—quietly, like a stray animal, unsure of whether it’s welcome. Thoughts drift like smoke in an abandoned room—aimless, fragrant, impossible to catch. They curl into the corners of my brain, wafting through the wreckage of old memories, clinging to the peeling wallpaper of…
“Most people fall in love like rain; I fall like wreckage.”—Emily Slatin Most people fall in love like rain—soft, steady, the kind that gently soaks in over time. They ease into it, step by step, trusting that each drop will collect into something nourishing. I never learned that kind of love. I don’t fall like…
Some mornings, you don’t wake up so much as you surface—pulled out of a half-dream, half-memory place where the weight of the past is heavier than the day ahead. Today was one of those mornings. I woke up already sad, already somewhere else, and I let it happen. The playlist was Bear’s Den and Bruce…
The stereo’s spinning again. Not a Bluetooth speaker, not some cold digital stream humming through soulless plastic—but an actual stereo. The kind with physical buttons you can punch down like you’re dialing into a memory. Indigo Girls – 1200 Curfews. Track 12. Closer to Fine. A CD I’ve owned since it came out, and one…
Lately, my mother has been calling me to talk about death. Not in the abstract or philosophical sense—she isn’t suddenly overcome with introspection. No, for her, dying is a task list, a ledger of unfinished business that she’s decided I need to complete on her behalf. The way she tells it, I’m some unfinished project…
Some of the most significant moments in life slip in quietly, like soft footsteps on a worn-out wooden floor — so subtle you hardly notice until they have already rewritten everything you thought you knew. Our story started, as most modern stories do, with a reply on Twitter. Amelia had posted a #WritersLift—an open call…
This morning, I keep thinking about the storm I carry inside me—how it’s always been there, humming just beneath the surface, daring the world to notice. It is not new. It didn’t just arrive one day. It was born with me, braided into my breath, threaded into every bone. Some days, I wonder if people…
Some nights I sit with the silence and feel like I’m eavesdropping on my own past. The 1990s were the best decade of my life, and I don’t say that with any polished nostalgia or rose-tinted yearning for mixtapes, AOL Chatrooms, and pagers. I say it because I was still half-feral then—caught somewhere between a…