I need to share something difficult — not for advice, not for comfort, but because sometimes grief needs a shape outside the body, and if I don’t give it one it will keep living in my ribs like a trapped animal. For those who’ve known me a long time, you know who this is about without me saying it. The old story. The one that became a quiet landmark in the geography of my life. The relationship that ended and never really ended, because the ending didn’t come with an explanat

There’s a kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being single. It’s not about not being loved. It’s not even about not being chosen. It’s about not being matched. I’ve been loved—many times, by many people. But I have yet to meet someone who loves like I do, who shows love the way I do. And that is a different kind of grief. Because what do you do when the thing that defines you, the thing you offer most freely, the fire that burns in your chest like purpose, is a lan

A Field Guide to Future-Faking, Overwhelm, Polyamorous Grief, and the Quiet Ruptures We Don’t Notice Until They Break Us There are heartbreaks that scream, and then there are heartbreaks that simply… vanish. Not with a dramatic ending. Not with a fight. Just a sudden absence — a door closing mid-sentence while the ink is still wet. This is a post about that second kind. Not as a callout. Not as a revenge letter. Not as a “here’s what you did to me.” This is a map. A prot

Preface (For the One Who Might Someday Read This) If you ever read this, I want you to know I do not hate you. What happened hurt me deeply— and it hurt my wife too— but the hurt is grief, not anger. I understand, even in the parts you didn’t say aloud, why you pulled away: the fear, the overwhelm, the suddenness of intimacy that your nervous system couldn’t hold. That doesn’t mean I believe the way it ended was right; there were gentler, clearer ways this could have unfolded

The light always feels brightest right before the fatigue sets in. After the rebuilding, after the hope, after the long nights of believing the world might actually hold—there comes the weight of continuation. The high of hope fades, and what remains is the quiet, repetitive labor of keeping it alive. That’s the test no one warns you about: not the cruelty itself, but the grind that follows survival. The long stretch of days when you’ve seen too much to be naive, but not enou

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.

Grief, Memory, and the Echoes That Stay With Us The last thing I can clearly remember my grandmother saying was this: “Your kids are crazy.” We were in Florida, in the little outdoor patio space of her senior living complex. She had vascular dementia by then—supervised care, memory lapses, the usual cruelness of a fading mind—but her voice that day was sharp, warm, amused. My brother and I must have been doing something loud or silly or both, because she turned to my mom, sai

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 into the language of gods and dragons. Fay used to believe that names were just masks—handles chosen to slip into a different skin. They were for forums, for MMOs, for quiet corners of the internet where you could become who you weren’t allowed to be. Ryu Hikari was one of those names at first: half drawn from a wandering boy who carried the bl

Back in 2013, I scribbled a list into a cheap Beatles themed notebook. A list of rules. Life rules. Survival rules. Philosophy rules. It was messy—literally written in different colors of ink, with smudges and strikethroughs and new thoughts wedged between the old ones. It wasn’t polished. But it was mine. And looking at it now, over a decade later, it feels like the very first whisper of the worldview I’ve since come to call Ethicism. I didn’t know that name yet, didn’t have

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, let's call her Squeak, and I loved her endlessly, regardless of her actions. I was convinced she was cheating on me, and decades later I would learn that maybe it was true. I also found out that two people, my first “friends,” were paying her on a dare to date me. She broke my heart, and that heartbreak led me straight to my first psych ward st

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 connected, showing what love means to me beyond the fire and storm. The first season was longing — To Be Wanted Back. It was the porch light, the lighthouse, the bus seat left open. It was me saying: here is what wanting me looks like, here is what love should look like in return. It was hunger and grief without a funeral. The ache of being t

We didn’t talk much that morning. Just sat there, watching the sun catch the road like it had a secret to tell. It’s funny—when I was younger, I used to believe that love meant finding “The One.” My soulmate. My twin flame. Chalk it up to Disney movies, maybe, or just being a kid who wanted to feel safe and chosen. Even in elementary school, that was the daydream running through my head. Not “what do you want to be when you grow up?” but “who’s going to sit beside me forever?

Some stories don’t end in triumph. Some don’t end in reconciliation. Some just end in silence, and the decision to stop carrying someone else’s weight. This is one of those stories. For fifteen years, I loved someone. Not passively, not distantly. Romantically, fiercely, foolishly at times. He was the first man I ever had feelings for, and I believed, again and again, that if I just held on long enough — if I carried both of us long enough — he’d find his way back to the boy

Those words sit on my chest like a wet coat. They are not dramatic for me; they are accurate. Not because a stranger told me so once, but because I keep proving it to myself — in the small, honest places where I can’t hide. In the ways I’ve spoken (too loud, too blunt), in the ways I’ve lashed out when sleep and food and safety ran thin, in the ledger I keep of all the times I failed to be the person I promised I’d be. I am not trying to be poetic about it. I am trying to be

The smallest kindnesses—turning down the volume, reminding me to eat—kept me standing when I thought I’d fall. I don’t think any of us get through this life on our own. We like to imagine we’re self-sufficient, that we pull ourselves up and carry the weight alone. But sooner or later, life knocks every one of us flat. Illness, loss, betrayal, heartbreak, storms you didn’t see coming. Nobody is too strong to fall. And when you do, what gets you through isn’t politics or argume

Cruelty is loud. Apathy is rampant. My rebellion is simple: keep caring, keep clear, keep human in an ordinary world.