Passages
Anyone who has ever quit anything knows all too well that it’s never just about the cessation of the thing. It’s about what drives us to the precipice, and what we discover beyond it.
short story
re-contextualizing travel (with ghosts)
I finally found a natural counterbalance for all that dogged seeking. It didn’t matter if I was shopping in Scotland or sipping coffee in Savannah, the highlight of every trip was always the same, and somehow perfectly unique each time. Perhaps driven by a subconscious urge to recharge, I learned to ground myself with microdoses of actual human connection.
still
For three years I avoided stagnation by piling on more chaos, traveling, burning through my savings, ending up back at my parents’ house to let my bank account refill. Yesterday, I sent 50,000 carefully culled and crafted words to an editor with the intention of turning them into a book. Those two things could not have coexisted…
cool girl, bad habits
I was, I thought, cool. Not in the real effortless Paul Newman way we think of cool, obviously, but I believed that if I adorned myself with enough physical trappings of cool, I would absorb it by osmosis. Like the giant bug alien (Edgar) in Men in Black, I was wearing a cool suit. And just like Edgar, I was not pulling it off.
brave girls
I’m watching low clouds pour over the sandstone peaks of the Colorado Front Range from the window of my rented cabin. The grey damp lends itself to a productive day of work at my laptop, letting me get lost in deep projects or skim across my email inbox like a hawk across the glassy surface …