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

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

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

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, 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

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

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

I have thought of sealing the cave, letting the torches gutter, burying myself under stone and silence. I have thought of hoarding...

I wrote before about wanting to be wanted back. Tonight I write from the other side of that want— the place where the porch light still...

I have carried this feeling my whole life— a wet coat across the chest, a tightness that doesn’t loosen, grief without a funeral. I have...

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?

The Trump administration has now confirmed the worst of the rumors. In a sweeping set of announcements, they have officially endorsed the...

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

I still remember the boy who spoke in storyboards and starlight, who built worlds from wonder and dreamed of saving them. I don’t know if...

I used to think we were walking the same road, two travelers carrying the same weight, seeing the same cracks in the world. It felt less...

I thought love might be enough— twenty years of reaching, twenty years of believing that if anyone could break through the mirrors, it...

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

So, let’s talk about the news that broke today. I don’t know who will read this, or how it will be judged, or what eyes will pick it apart once it leaves my hands. That’s fine. I only know that I can’t carry it silently. I need to let it out, to trace the shape of my grief in words, even if I don’t have answers. Because this is not how it should have happened. There is no healing in this. No restoration. The people who were harmed by his words, by the violence he nurtured and

Nothing Is Wrong  is what I said to survive—but every note tells the truth: storm, fracture, survival, and finally, a breath of serenity....