After the wound, there is silence. After the silence, there are words. But not all words heal. You learn this quickly — that language itself can bruise. That the wrong sentence, even said softly, can reopen something you thought had already closed. That words are how cruelty survives when the blades have dulled, how hate outlives the moment it was born. The monster doesn’t always come with a weapon in hand. Sometimes it just speaks — and teaches others how. In The Garden With

The wind doesn’t sting anymore. It carries me. Healing doesn’t mean the wound disappears. It means it becomes part of the landscape — tended, known, integrated. Some days the garden smells like soil and forgiveness. Other days it smells like rain on scar tissue. But still, something grows. That’s the truest miracle: not forgetting the pain, but making beauty out of what tried to end you. We plant gardens in strange places — in the ashes of what we lost, in the hollowed-out sp

It’s easy to hate. It’s easy to call it righteous. It’s easy to look at the wreckage and think, I’ll never be like them, while clutching your own blade a little tighter. Because anger feels clean. It makes the world simple again. There’s a strange comfort in fury — in naming villains, in pointing toward what’s wrong and feeling, for once, that you’re on the side of what’s right. But I’ve learned that even righteous anger rots if you hold it too long. It starts whispering to y

They did something terrible. You don’t need me to tell you what. You already know who they are. Their face formed in your mind the moment you read that first line. Maybe it’s one face. Maybe it’s a crowd. Maybe it’s an entire belief system that moves like smoke and sounds like power. You can see their hands — the ones that did the unforgivable thing. You can hear the words they used to justify it, the way they laughed, the way the world seemed to let them walk away untouched.

His name isn’t here. It doesn’t need to be. He could have been anyone—someone’s son, someone’s favorite person, someone who carried more light than most people realize they’re capable of holding. There are people who move through the world as reminders. They don’t lecture or preach. They simply are. Their laughter softens a room, their small acts of patience change its temperature, and before you know it, they’ve quietly rearranged your understanding of what compassion means.

We trace the patterns. That’s what we do. Not because we want to be prophets, or martyrs, or right. But because we’re scared. Because we’ve seen this before. Because somewhere beneath the noise and the slogans and the calls for blood, we remember what it means to be human. This is the tenth post in a series I wish I never had to write. I thought maybe one piece would be enough. One scream. One warning. One grief made public. But the world kept moving. The machine kept turnin

It starts with a shrug. A cough dismissed. A mask pocketed. A headline scrolled past. The quiet normalization of risk. The idea that “everyone will get it eventually.” That some people just won’t make it, and that’s fine. That’s the price of moving on. But that’s how political violence begins — not with spectacle, but with consent. With the slow erosion of empathy, the bureaucratization of suffering, the dulling of outrage until neglect becomes policy. The body count turns in

Grief, Memory, and the Echoes That Stay With Us The last thing I can clearly remember my grandmother saying was this: “Your kids are...

The photo that started it all. Taken from a bedroom window in the Lakes District, UK It didn’t start with the camera. It never does. It...

It didn’t happen all at once. That’s what makes it so terrifying. There was no singular law passed, no dystopian regime, no camera drilled into the center of every ceiling. What happened instead was slower. Quieter. Cultural. Algorithmic. We turned ourselves into witnesses, into judges, into brands. We learned to perform—and then forgot we were performing. And somewhere along the way, the surveillance state didn’t need to grow stronger. It just needed us to keep watching each

A story of two people, one myth, and the ache that lingers when gods grow quiet. A shared delusion, born of trauma and longing, woven...

Back in 2013, I scribbled a list into a cheap Beatles themed notebook. A list of rules. Life rules. Survival rules. Philosophy rules. It...

A dream that shouldn’t have to be a dream (and what we can build right now) If you removed the budget caps. If you lifted the policies...

High school was starting, and I was a mess. All I could think about back then was finding a soulmate. I met my first real girlfriend,...

Strange days are here again. Seven years. That was the line I carried like armor. Seven years sober. Seven years of saying “no,” of...

The words are out in the open now. Not whispered in think tank reports, not hidden in policy drafts, not implied between lines of speeches — spoken plainly, with applause in the halls of Quantico. The new banner is raised: defense is dead. Defense is no longer. War has taken its place. We are told peace is not the mission. War is. We are told pacifism is not caution. It is “naive and dangerous.” We are told lethality is not a grim necessity but a calling card. And we are

Some poems arrive as fragments, but others arrive as seasons. This one came in three. At the last section, is a blog post separate but...

It was never going to take long. The gunfire was still echoing, the grief still raw, and already the script was waiting. Not from the fringes this time, not from anonymous accounts stitching lies together in the dark corners of the internet, but from the podium of the White House itself. A statement polished to a blade: blame named, enemy chosen, cause declared. “Unhinged crusade.” That’s the phrase they use. Not grief, not inquiry, not even hesitation—just crusade. As if cri

It starts quietly, like so much else in this country now. An order slips across the wires, sudden and absolute: every general, every admiral, every senior commander above a certain rank must be in Virginia. Not a request. A command. Rearrange your missions, reroute your flights, leave your posts. The world will wait. And they come. Hundreds of them. Veterans of old wars, survivors of deployments that stretched decades, men and women who have buried soldiers under too many fla

It keeps happening. We’ve seen another shooting. This time, two ICE detainees are critically injured, with one dead, in Dallas. And already, the same war machine is turning: press conferences, buzzwords, declarations of war. A shell casing marked “ANTI-ICE” becomes the proof of an ideology. A name. A face. A photo. A post. That’s all it takes. The script is ready. But dig even slightly beneath the surface and it slips. As Ken Klippenstein has uncovered , Joshua Jahn, the shoo