Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Tag: Life
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Last month, I lost one of my friends from work. We had worked together on the same Tuesday night shift for well over a decade, and in that time we became more than just two people on the crew. In a career like ours, you grow accustomed to seeing loss—line-of-duty tragedies, sudden retirements, familiar faces…
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This morning I woke up with that old sentence echoing in my head, the one a therapist once gave me like a cold prescription: your problem is that you’re the daughter of a broken man. I remember the way it landed, clinical and sharp, like someone had boiled my whole life down to a single…
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I am sitting on the edge of my childhood bed, the same twin bed I slept in decades ago. The house is quiet aside from the low hum of cars passing and the soft strains of Pearl Jam’s Ten album playing on my phone. I’ve got the window cracked open—just like I used to—and I…
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I disappeared. Not in the tidy, storybook way people want to believe—no heartfelt goodbye, no neat conclusion, no time for anyone to brace themselves. I vanished in the rawest sense. One morning I stood up, walked out, and never came back. No explanations. No apologies. Just a chair left empty and the sound of me…
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There are days when the silence swallows me whole, and it is not the kind of silence I once cherished—the silence of a cold Vermont night where even the pines seem to breathe in rhythm with me. This is the kind of silence that drips bitterness on the tongue, like chewing aspirin dry. It tastes…
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It rained today on my 46th birthday. Not a long, cinematic storm—no thunder, no sky-wide crescendo, no poetic deluge to make it mean something larger. Just one of those sudden summer stutters that slips through the valley like it remembered something it meant to say, then lost interest halfway through. The air shifted like it…
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Whenever I think of the early 1990s, it hits me like a half-remembered melody from a mixtape someone made just for me—the kind you played until the tape wore thin, because it was the only thing that ever made you feel understood. That time wasn’t just a backdrop. It was a frequency I lived on. Everything felt…
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I never set out to make sense of my life. I just wanted to survive it. Somewhere between New York sirens and Vermont silence, I learned that memory doesn’t arrive like a knock at the door—it comes as weather. Sudden. Heavy. Familiar. Sometimes, it sounds like a woman’s voice saying goodbye for the last time.…
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The call came in like they always do with her—out of nowhere, with the subtlety of a lit match in a fireworks store. Makayla doesn’t preface. She doesn’t build suspense. She just kicks the door in with her voice and waits for the world to catch up. “Wanna go to Atlanta?” She said it like…
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Every human being who has ever walked this strange, spinning planet has, whether or not they admit it, dreamed of seeing themselves in third person. It’s the secret behind mirrors, behind security cameras, behind every carefully framed selfie and the unspoken popularity of drones. We all want to see ourselves living—not merely existing, but being.…
