Every day around noon, the park across the street and a couple of buildings over boils with tiny voices calling to each other. The excited yelling of recess drifts up to my street-facing windows to mix with the droll hum of traffic, sirens of varying distance, and other soundtracks of living in a big city. I find myself thinking back to the years when I was let out into the bright Texas sun to run around and release the coiled energy built up while sitting in a classroom. When life felt big and days were long.

My elementary school had a huge four-trunked tree in the center of a sea of gravel with a border of railroad ties in its back playgrounds. In retrospect, there was entirely too much space. There were easily three acres to run out every bit of energy you had, but the tree was my favorite. One trunk had been cut low enough to use as a step, leading between the two largest trunks to another that had been flattened into a platform. From the enormous canopy were hung three ropes, the center rope was placed so that you could launch from the platform, safely on the huge knot. The thrill of the jump and swinging through the air before tossing the rope back up to the person waiting in line behind you was a daily high point.

One day, I was waiting on the platform for the person ahead of me to finish and had turned to say something or laugh with the person behind me. Neither the person who had just finished a swing nor I were paying attention, and so as I turned forward there was no time to react to the knot of rope, nearly as big as my head, that came rushing toward me. The rope was tossed back absentmindedly without looking by my classmate who probably was on the rush to the next recess activity and it turned out to be an absolutely perfect pitch. It hit me square between the eyes. Within seconds, a huge knot of my own formed on my face that only seemed to get bigger before eventually setting back down. To this day I wonder if that injury caused my skin to grow past where it should have stopped, resulting in the excess skin that gives me particularly expressive expressions.

For years, I’ve thought aging felt like moving through a funnel. At first, life appears endless in every direction but slowly, almost invisibly, options begin disappearing. Careers are chosen, cities settled in or abandoned, and relationships are pursued or lost. Futures are quietly ruled out. The farther along you move, the aperture of possibility decreases as options are exhausted or disregarded. Through the action of life, choices are narrowed as the future comes slowly into view and whatever path you’re on becomes more and more clear. But, as I call back upon the vibrancy of that eight-year-old me, I wonder if I haven’t been wrong this entire time.

Recently, I fell into reading about retrocausality and the strange behavior of photons in double-slit experiments. The simplified version, at least simplified enough for me to pretend I understand it, is that observation appears to alter behavior. The outcome changes depending on whether something is being watched. What interested me wasn’t quantum physics so much as the implication. The unsettling possibility that the outcome can change what came before it.

When photons are shot through a barrier with two slits, the results are the expected cluster patterns. But when the photons are observed to see which slit they pass through, suddenly they act in wave patterns. The act of observation changes their behavior. But this is the best bit: when observation is moved to the other side of the barrier, the photons change again. You would now expect the original cluster patterns but still get wave patterns in observation. There is no perceivable way for a photon, a particle of light, to know it’s being observed. So if the accumulating causations determine the outcome, can the outcome retroactively determine the causation?

Depending on your source material, retrocausality can move between hotly debated to debunked. Although it does present a useful thought experiment. Through the action of life, Events A, B, C, and D have produced Outcome X, and maybe this outcome is far from the intended one. But can my present outcome change my causations? The life I have now is not the life I planned, but what if I let that life rewrite its own origin points? Maybe this is an overly-wrought scientific explanation of the more therapeutic idea of reframing, or it could be quantum physics reminding us of the power of reframing.

What once felt like traveling through a cone and narrowing of possibility is maybe more like cones stacked end to end, or bowties all in a row. Where I start with endless options that are reduced to a single point, that then opens up an entirely new set of decisions. The decision points in life aren’t necessarily limiting, they only open up directions that we’ve never considered before. The action of life doesn’t constrict, it brings us to a certain point where new paths are revealed. Paths we never thought to walk down.

The sounds of recess always bring me back to my elementary playground. The heat of the sun, flushed faces gently parting sweaty hair, the smell of being outside. I can still see the closeup of rough fibers milliseconds before the rope knot slammed into my face. The extra skin on my brow between my eyes now sits as a feature, not a flaw. The vibrant remembrance of my eight-year-old self is still present in my forty-four-year-old body. Seeing the world through his eyes not as limiting, but as endless possibility.

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Sometimes we just need to act like kids.

On a Friday last July, I left New York City on a jet plane headed toward Los Angeles. A few weeks earlier I was informed that my position was being eliminated, the first time I’d ever been laid off. The year leading up to that point, I became increasingly worried with the worsening economy that something like this would happen. Meetings with my company-mandated mentor toggled between me searching to find absolution that my corporate value was clear, and searching for reassurance that I was safe. After receiving both countless times, probably at my mentor’s exhaustion, two tips were imparted: if it comes to that, it won’t be a surprise because there will be several lead-up meetings to correct behavior or improve output (and luckily my record on both counts was always great if not exemplary); and you shouldn’t be worried unless you arrive to a meeting and HR is unexpectedly in the room. And so those few weeks before my flight, I arrived at the conference room door hearing my mentor and, unexpectedly, the head of HR chatting on the other side.

This notice came during a period where I was trying to somehow attend two birthday celebrations of friends in Los Angeles over subsequent weekends. A work event being scheduled the week in between was forcing me to choose one birthday to fly West, or neither. Now it seemed my calendar had cleared up.

The weeks between being told I was headed for the exit and actually walking through that door were a blur. Damocles sword above my head, I couldn’t think clearly to plan out next steps. My body seemed to take on this confusion and lowered its defenses, allowing me to take on a bad cold that after a week developed into bronchitis. Every day I woke up unable to distinguish between the emotional weight of the cliff ahead from the congestion in my chest. They each pressed down hard, making the deep coughs difficult. But I knew I couldn’t stay in my NYC apartment alone, listening to the sirens and sounds of traffic, on my first day without a job.

So for my last technical day of employment, I booked an early morning flight. Finding a good fare and deciding that I deserved a treat, a first class seat shepherded me across the country and into a new chapter. On the final approach, I put my music library on shuffle and looked out the window as the city came into focus below me, six years of memories pressing up through the smog. The afternoon light came in warm on my right side. Landing in Los Angeles, perfectly scripted, Old Man by Neil Young began. With this beacon of 1970s California classic rock in the background, I pulled out my phone as we taxied to the gate, executed my separation agreement, and so began a new beginning I had not asked to start and had no idea where it would lead.

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When faced with limited options, I can still feel like I’m in control. But if faced with unlimited options after being thrust into change, it feels chaotic and unmanageable. How to know where to begin?

It feels like my typical facade is an unguarded Puck, but this carefully covers a tightly-wound interior world. Starting my career in Congress on Capitol Hill, there’s a feeling of hierarchy created with a simple equation: branch of government + who your boss is + your job = social position. If some staffers can separate a personal sense of worth from their job, I began to view them as intrinsically linked. As I rose through the ranks and over the years, my job seemed to be the only value I contributed to the world. Single with no kids, what else did I have to offer? Now that I became a line item to cross out, the thing that made me feel valuable was found to be not valuable enough to keep.

One of the first things I did after the news of my layoff was to get an anti-anxiety prescription from my doctor. We’d talked about anxiety and depression before, but it never came to this. Even asking felt like defeat. The words came out as a job update first, but she could hear the tension underneath. I knew where that road went; I’d been close enough before to know I didn’t want to go back. The medically-induced emotional mask helps. But it doesn’t change the fact that we are not in control. At best, we create illusions of it.

That’s the real struggle, making a decision to be happy despite the uncontrollables. But what a difference your friends, community, and chosen family can make. That trip to LA, I stayed with dear friends, celebrated the 40th birthday of one, laid by the pool, ate too much, drank too much, went to Palm Springs to celebrate another birthday, and remembered that my value had never been a line item.

Surrounding myself with the people I still carry from a previous version of my life was the best thing I could have done. As I’ve moved from city to city over the years, there are pockets of people across the country with whom I share countless memories. That week in California, I kept thinking of those I’ve added to my extended family tree and everything that’s happened along the way. My secret agent birthday party in Dallas. The bar we used to go to in Washington, D.C. Celebrating a wedding against a backdrop of beachside fireworks in Mexico. The Chicago night we won a presidential election. The night we lost a presidential election and I took my campaign team to a gay bar in downtown LA. Through it all, how lucky we are. How lucky I am.

Last July I made a decision: this layoff, this push, will be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Listening to Neil Young again while I write this, I’m still finding my path forward.

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Getting off of the train from London in Salisbury, our eyes widened with the view of a Medieval village bright with sand-colored ancient stones soaking up surprisingly mild and bright day. We wandered through the cobblestoned streets and village square, heads on a swivel scanning stalls and shop windows. We were loud in the way Americans are when they travel: practically skipping, laughing and joking with each other. The bicycles around us provided the inspiration. They were everywhere being ridden or rested, easily moving through the streets or leaning against stone walls, the low horizon of the English countryside tempting me. The lush greens of the fields beyond called and I blurted out, “We should rent bikes!”

In the Fall of 2001, I was studying in London and went on a day trip with a roommate to see Stonehenge. We had planned, as most do, to take a short bus ride from the center of Salisbury to Stonehenge. At only fifteen or twenty minutes, how hard could it be to bike instead? And what a great way to see the scenery!

Unfortunately, my roommate readily agreed. We bounded toward a sporting goods store so I could buy a new pair of cheap but more sensible pants – I didn’t look forward to finding out if the light wool trousers I had worn would chafe.

After buying new pants and stuffing the trousers in my backpack, we headed to a bike rental shop in town for two bikes and one map. The journey was absolutely gorgeous, twisting through woods and fields, our legs loose and pace reckless. By bus, it was about ten miles but one thing the maps didn’t show us was the elevation change. The rolling hills of South West England gave two inexperienced riders a lesson in pain.

Our single-speed bikes creaked in protest as our progress increasingly slowed. Pausing at the top of a hill on a two-lane country road, we would gather our breath before the reward of launching down the other side before repeating it again and again. On a particularly steep decline, the fact that the brakes on my bike were totally non-existent became clear. As the wooded road bent ahead, I careened past my roommate, unable to stop or slow down. The blind corner ahead was coming fast and with no control, I drifted into the wrong side of the road. We hadn’t seen many cars to that point but if one was about to pass us, that was it. I’d be killed.

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The shaking bicycle beneath me, I quickly calculated my options. I was already leaning into the corner as far as I could and was still edging more and more into the wrong lane. If I leaned further, I’d lose traction. If I ditched on purpose, I’d be injured. Although, probably not dead. Or I could take my chances and hope the quiet we’d seen so far continued. I tried to yell behind me but if my roommate said anything in return, I couldn’t hear it through the sound of the wind rushing by.

Strangely, I wondered what it would look like if I ditched or was hit. Would people wonder when will those stupid Americans learn the British drive on the other side of the road? Would I make the news back home? Do these stupid pants I just bought even match the rest of my outfit?

Years later, while living in Washington, D.C., I received a flower on a first date. My date was a lovely and charming man about my age and as we greeted each other outside the restaurant, he handed me a single red carnation. The first, and only, time anyone had done that for me. It was such a sweet gesture that seemed like only the sort of thing that happened in movies. But as we walked to the table, holding it made me self-conscious. Immediately, I set it down beside my place setting. After dinner, we left the restaurant and might have gone to a bar for a drink, I don’t remember. But I do remember on the walk making sure to slip into conversation the lie that I had forgotten the flower at the table. Following my choreographed remark, my date replied that he had noticed. It wasn’t difficult to hear the disappointment behind his words.

As the years pass, I’m getting better about my relationship with the way others perceive me, but there’s a lot to release. I learned early how to manage what people saw, both in conspicuous efforts and in more subtle ways of presentation.

The flamboyant boy growing up in Texas quickly learns how to read a room. What to say or not to say, how to walk with a scowled face so you don’t look so gay. But a red carnation instantly changes a relationship from two friends eating together or walking down the street, to two dudes on a date – which historically for me, was a danger zone. It made me visible and therefore a target. That was the problem. As a teenager, being different is just about the worst thing but approaching middle age, and there’s still something about sticking out in a crowd that makes me uncomfortable. I’m jealous of those people who seem to be so careless, full of joie de vivre, and couldn’t care less what a stranger thinks or says to them or about them.

Something that RuPaul loves to say is, “what other people think of me is none of my business.” That’s the vibe I’m going for now.

We made it to Stonehenge that day twenty-five years ago. I didn’t ditch the bike on that curve, I took my chances and thankfully no car came. Breathlessly, I told my roommate what happened after I was able to stop the bike and he caught up to me, now in the clear off the road. We were then out of water and walked our bikes to the nearest house we could see. Adrenaline still pumping, I rang the bell and a bit too smiley and formally said to the woman who answered, “Excuse me, country madam. Could we please fill up our water bottles?” Unsure of what was going on, she looked both of us up and down, at our empty containers and resting bikes, then let out a slow “Okaaaayyyyyy…,” then closed the front door behind her leaving us to wait on the front step.

Not much time was spent exploring the stone ruins, it was late and we were properly exhausted by the time we arrived. One spin around the rocks and a camera roll of photos later, we took the bus back to town with the bikes in tow.

I took my chances with the curve and managed to stay upright. I wish I had been that brave holding a flower on a date.

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Sitting in the large, open room in downtown Los Angeles with the other jury pool candidates, I was not in a great mood. At the time, I was Chief Operating Officer at a nonprofit entering an especially busy period and, despite starting my career in government and politics and knowing the importance of an engaged jury, I simply didn’t want to. And having to deal with morning LA traffic to make it there in time did not exactly induce deep joy within me.

Calling the room to order, the Jury Clerk stood behind a podium reading the same text she’d had to read countless times before, and I was toward the back of the room in a surprisingly uncomfortable chair. Between us were dozens of people, maybe a hundred or more, and one of the large, square columns in a row that bisected the room blocked my view. There was a short list of acceptable conditions which could excuse you from service and the first joy of the morning came when I heard one that applied to me. The Jury Clerk then called roll, like a huge elementary classroom, and each person responded in turn “yes” or “no” if they were able to serve.

A bit of background is needed for this next part. Growing up, I always wanted to be an actor. I started college as a theater major after being heavily involved in my junior high and high school programs. All to say, I’m very good at engaging my diaphragm and projecting across an auditorium.

So when my name was called, not being able to see exactly where the Jury Clerk stood and how much to project, I was startled no less than those around me when, “NOOO” came booming out of my mouth, the echo reverberating off the bare cavernous walls. It was like Gandalf was pronouncing in Dolby sound that he wasn’t able to serve on a jury.

The Jury Clerk paused, likely waiting for the floor to stop vibrating, then after a few beats took a deep breath and said in a well-tempered tone, “Ok…. thank you.” All of the blood in my body had immediately collected from my neck through the top of my head following my proclamation, so as I exhaled a sigh of relief I sunk a bit lower in my chair in the now burning-hot room.

Having moved back to New York City three years ago, this memory came to me as I settled in a new jury pool waiting room in downtown NYC. A day of waiting lay ahead and as we all settled in with books, laptops, and phones, I put on The Stone Roses 1989 debut album. It sends me straight into nostalgia. My eldest brother introduced it to me in the mid-90s and I’ve loved it ever since.

Seated in front of me was a young woman with dark roots coming through bleached and colored hair in a messy bun. It matched her sweater, pale green and pink. Because I’m nosy, I also couldn’t help but notice her paperwork over her shoulder which listed her birth year as 2000. Like a proper Millenial, I’m always about 10-15 years off; for instance, 2010 was five years ago, 2000 was no more than fifteen. The realization that she’s turning twenty-freaking-six years old this year was too much.

With The Stone Roses playing in my ears, I started thinking about who I was when she was born. Graduating high school that year, soon to be off to college in Denver, and the next year studying abroad in London. Exploring for the first time a city that would become one of my favorites. The energy of youth and an ocean between the world I knew and I.

It was only the Fall term, but an eye-opening three months. It would become something more for both me and the world. Arriving in London on Thursday, there was an allowance of several days to adjust and settle in before starting our academic program. We were studying English Theater in a class led by the Chair of our university theater department, a class at The Globe, and one at City University London. Our first day at The Globe was the afternoon of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

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At our flat, it was a bright and beautiful day. Watching TV before having to leave for class, breaking news took over the channel and I saw images of the first World Trade Center tower in New York billowing dark smoke. It was nearly 2:00pm and trying to make sense of the shocking scene, I used the calling card my parents had loaded money on to call home. My mother was getting ready for work and I told her to go turn on the TV. Together, with expensive minutes being used in silence, we watched the second plane hit. She in Dallas, me in London, watching the world change by what was happening in New York.

When the jury pool in New York was released for a lunch break, I set off in search of a diner for a sandwich and badly needed coffee. Instead, I found Columbus Park on the edge of Chinatown. The unseasonably warm weather had brought out a crowd and it was too perfect to keep walking. A delicious lemongrass beef Banh-Mi led to a leisurely perusal of a quaint bookshop next door, and I was reenergized for more civic duty.

After the passing of a quiet morning followed by freedom out in the world, we collected back into the waiting room for any news of our individual or collective fate. Moving from the feeling early that morning of “Is this right? Am I in the right place?”, we had slowly taken shape into something more. It felt as though a room full of strangers was moving toward camaraderie, a cohesive group in this together.

It’s easy to believe we’re in control of how we show up in a room by how much we reveal, how we’re perceived, how tightly we hold the version of ourselves we’ve decided to present. But sitting there, hours into a day none of us had chosen, the performances had worn off. No one was particularly interesting or impressive or even trying to be. Just people waiting, occasionally looking up from their screens, aware of one another without needing to prove anything. It struck me how rare it is to be among others without the pressure to be seen in any particular way.

In Los Angeles, I announced myself to a room and separated from it, my voice louder than intended, the performance got away from me before I could catch it. In New York, I sat quietly, constructing small narratives about the people around me, measuring time by someone else’s birth year, and by the distance between who I was and who I thought I should be. And in London, there was no performance at all. Just my mother and I, thousands of miles apart, watching the same thing at the same time.

Back in the jury room, it felt closer to that than anything else. No stage, no audience, no script. Just the quiet recognition that we were all there together, whether we wanted to be or not.

We think we control how we show up, but certain moments strip that away and reveal us as part of something shared. We spend most of our lives as individuals, until something (like time, accident, or crisis) reminds us we’re not. How strange it is that a room of strangers can briefly feel like something more, and then disappear back into nothing.

In the end, no one was called for jury duty that day. After receiving our proof of service, we silently gathered our things, crowded in elevators, and walked out into the city. Dispersing back into our separate lives.

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I am standing in my childhood bedroom. It’s daytime. No one else is home. Then Daddad appears. He floats in. Tall, familiar, smiling.

A few months before, my grandfather passed away. In his final years, his health slowly deteriorated. The last coincided with my freshman year of college. I was in Denver for my first year away from home, trying to find myself and drinking more than I admitted to my parents. Daddad was in and out of the hospital in Tyler, Texas.

He always seemed so gigantic to me, his six foot two inch frame felt massive. But any intimidation dissolved in the light behind his eyes and his sly smile, like there was a joke that only you and he were in on.

Toward the end, there were many close calls. He would be rushed to the hospital and the doctors would think that day might be his last. Then his body would prove them wrong and he would pull through, at least long enough to go home again.

Over Spring Break of my Freshman year, I went home to Dallas. One day, my mother announced that Daddad had another close call but since we had been at this moment before, we couldn’t be sure if this might be another false alarm. Regardless, she would make the drive back to Tyler, even though we had just come back there a couple of days earlier. I could come if I wanted, but staying home to enjoy Spring Break was fine, too. I briefly considered it, but there was no real choice. I had to go. I would never forgive myself if I missed the chance to see him one more time just to watch TV or see friends I’d have time for later.

By the time we arrived at the hospital in Tyler, the decision had been made to move him to hospice. He would make it through the day, but they were certain now that there wasn’t much time left. As preparations were made, he made jokes lying on the hospital bed, wires attached to his fading frame. “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” he said as his eyes smiled at me.

The doctors and nurses asked us to wait in the hallway as they made final preparations for transport. After several minutes in the hall, I turned and saw that magnificently strong man being wheeled out of the room on a stretcher, an incline at his waist so his torso was angled slightly up. I knew he was trying to keep his head high and convey to us that there was no need to be worried, his pride still intact even if his heart was failing him. At the same time, there was a slight emptiness behind his eyes, as if he had checked out just a little to better endure the indignity. Or maybe it was the morphine.

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The hospice was a long, flat building with a tall opening and a layered portico along the front. It was trying to be both grand and homely, a welcoming strip mall in a palette of neutral tones. Inside, dark colored low-pile carpet grounded the eye and hid stains. Plants and plush seating almost succeeded in creating an extension of a patient’s home, however the antiseptic smell of hospital-standard surfaces betrayed the true purpose of a comfortable place to spend your last days.

After Daddad was settled, we gathered in his room speaking softly, eyes already wet. What was he thinking? What was he feeling knowing these would be the last moments we would share?

My mother asked him if he had any wise words for me. She and I were thinking the same thing, expressed only through a quick glance exchanged with each other. This would be the last time I would see him alive. We had to drive back to Dallas shortly after this visit and I would fly back to Denver in a couple of days.

“Do you have any wise words for your grandson?” my mother asked. Daddad answered, “Do well in school.” It wasn’t much, but it was what he had.

Slowly, quietly, we filed out of the room; I told him I’d see him later and he said he loved me. Just outside his room was a waiting area with chairs and couches for the families to gather. As mine did exactly that, tearfully consoling each other for what was coming, I felt like a liar. I wouldn’t see him again, I couldn’t leave him like that.

Separating from the group without a word, I softly knocked on his slightly open door. As I pushed it open, “Daddad? Are you still awake?” “Yes, son,” he said as his eyes opened and his head pivoted on his pillow toward me. I walked to him, taking one of the large hands that had known me since birth. I needed a moment between just us, our smiling eyes together a final time, something only the two of us were in on.

I didn’t know how to say what I meant, the words felt too small. “I just, I wanted to tell you I love you,” I managed to say. As his eyes met mine, I became the little boy who literally and figuratively looked up to the man with the silver hair and the mustache. “Thank you, son,” he said and after a slight pause, “Don’t forget me.” “I won’t,” I promised him as tears finally broke free.

After bending down to place a kiss on his forehead for the first and last time in my life, I turned to leave. I knew we would soon lose him, and that I would be nearly a thousand miles away when it happened. His warm, thin skin lingered on my lips.

Shortly after I returned to school in Denver, the inevitable became real. I struggled for months wondering did he know how much I loved him? Did he understand that? Did he get it?

These questions tumbled in my head as I finished my first year in college, then returned to Dallas for the summer before leaving to study in London the next Fall. In late August, days before I was to leave to study abroad, he came back to me.

The night he visited my dreams, I saw him come toward me in my bedroom, once again tall and proud instead of sick and bedridden. I threw myself at him, arms around his neck, telling him again and again that I loved him. As he hugged me back, I could hear the smile in his voice as he said it back. I took his cheeks in my hands, staring hard into his eyes to say, “No! I...love...you.” The words felt inadequate but they were all I had.

Daddad returned my gaze and held it. “Thank you, son,” he repeated to me as he had on his deathbed. My arms then wrapped around his neck again, overjoyed to have the chance to see him again. But our time was up, that was it.

He tried to gingerly take my body away from his but I refused to go. I was not going to voluntarily end this moment, it meant too much. And then, with my arms around his neck and his hands under my arms, slowly, steadily I started to float up and away from him. Still, I refused to let go of my grasp. My legs lifted higher until I was upside down above him as he said, “Son, you need to let go. You have to let go…”

And then I woke up.

That dream was all I could think about the next day. The guilt I felt for being so far away, the wail of my grandmother, his wife of nearly 60 years, draped over his body during the funeral home viewing, I couldn’t carry it.

When I couldn’t release myself from it, he gave me the permission I needed. A second chance and final gift.

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said in an interview with Anderson Cooper that there are no rules in loss and grief. She recounted a story of being caught in a giggle fit with her sister when in front of her brother’s body at the funeral home. What may sound inappropriate for a somber setting was actually about sisters returning to an uncontrollable condition of their childhood. Connecting through laughter as they once did, three siblings sharing space.

It reminded me of my first haircut after getting back from my brother’s death and memorial. I’m a regular at a barber shop two buildings away, and after sitting down with one of my regular barbers, he asked about my trip and if it was business or pleasure. I was still unsure how to sit with the loss of my brother, and didn’t quite know how to talk about it. A clumsy reply came out of my mouth and, attempting to soften the gravity of what happened, I tried to accompany it with a sympathetic half-smile. What came out sounded more like a chuckle.

“Oh my god, what?!” he said. “Your brother died, why are you laughing?” I was mortified. I only meant to soften it, not make it sound like a chuckle or, even worse, a laugh. I stumbled through a mumble and the rest of the haircut was conducted mostly in silence. It wasn’t the only time recently that my reaction didn’t meet the moment.

What surprised me the most about being told I might have a hole in my retina was the lack of panic, the instant acceptance of something I couldn’t control. It certainly instigated some degree of worry, but my general feeling was “it is what it is, there’s nothing definite yet and nothing I can do to change the outcome.”

This was about a week before Christmas and unable to stay to get my eyes dilated for further exam, the doctor urged me to make an appointment after the holiday within two weeks. After giving my parents the update during my trip home, they expressed a bit more edged concern (probably the appropriate reaction). My brother who passed was fully blind so our family was well acquainted, and probably over sensitive, with vision problems.

Back in New York, the dilation confirmed worry if not suspicion of accuracy and I was referred to a retina specialist. Still strangely, absurdly blasé about the matter, this seemed to me as though simply the next step to take instead of potentially being the start of a long journey of deteriorating eyesight. A few days later in yet another waiting room, I was the youngest by a factor of decades. Around me were seats filled with bent backs, walking canes, and slow shuffles.

A few separate tests and photo sets plus a couple of hours later, I was with the specialist who gently and expertly told me to look this way and that as she shone a bright light and prodded and shifted my eyeballs in succession. After staring into the sun at different angles for five minutes, she made my prognosis. Not a tear, it was a blood spot. With no underlying conditions, it could mean nothing but I needed to come back in three months to check for any update.

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Sitting in the waiting room again today, my mind floated back to Patti Smith. In her conversation with Anderson, she also spoke about the sentimentality of objects. The permanent attachments to impermanent things. In my New York apartment are now kept a deck of Wayne’s Braille playing cards, an abacus of his, one of his collapsible walking canes. Well-used and dusty, these are totems I have no use for, but can’t ever see myself letting go of them. These are things he touched, he used. As a keeper of his memory, these are talismans.

There are certain habits and traits we are unwilling participants in adopting, passed down to us from parents. For me, one of those is collecting stuff. I prefer to consider it more of a layering approach than something akin to hoarding. In addition to holding on to things that might prove useful again, there are books I’ve loved, mementos places I’ve visited, vintage tchotchkes I’ve amassed – these are reminders of who I used to be or items of beauty. Wayne’s items now fit snugly in an over-stuffed bookshelf.

But now I wonder, does my form of collection stem from a desire, or need, to not let anything go? If it isn’t a curated effort, is it instead holding on to things when I can’t hold on to people?

My barber seemed shocked at my perceived laugh, to his credit I would have as well, had I heard someone accompany news of death with a chuckle. Maybe softening the moment and detachment come from the same place.

Deep within me lies an instinct to not take up too much space. Over the years, this has eased, but the child who tiptoed to not make too much noise around the house still tiptoes around his apartment to not disturb his downstairs neighbor. Was the desire to soften the mood when delivering terrible news a remnant of this? And when something falls outside of my own control, such as a retinal tear, do I then detach as a form of self-protection?

These deflections are suppression, not allowing myself to take up space or feel things as they come. The objects around me as some sort of emotional insulation, holding on to things instead of feeling deeply.

My pattern has become to soften, detach, and keep what’s left. But I’m coming to a point where I’m deciding which patterns are serving my best interests, and which are best left in the past.

Today, the doctor reported that the blood spot originally thought to be a possible tear has subsided. A random but not too uncommon occurrence has resolved itself. However, the rest of my work ahead will need to be a bit more intentional.

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Today, the quiet approach of marking the first anniversary of loss is here. There are no more heart-dropping moments when the waves of remembrance hit, while going through the banal motions of everyday life, that time is inching closer. It is here, and tomorrow the clock starts again. It is both hard and soft. Emotion bears down a physical weight that one has no choice but to shoulder, and yet there is lightness at the edges of the years of happy memories and laughter and awkward brotherly hugs. Streaks of light piercing through the dark clouds. When I was little, my mother told me that if the sun comes out while it’s raining, it won’t rain for long. That means the storm is passing.

The night after my brother passed as I was unable to sleep, a thought struck me that forced my body to move. In the despair of the late hours, and feeling as though I had to do something, to get something out in that moment, I started to write my brother’s obituary. A task I had never done before and no one asked me to do then, it was a compulsion of releasing a coiled spring in my body to honor one of my big brothers.

The strange thing is as I was experiencing it, each moment seemed to instantly sear itself on the ridges of my brain. Never having experienced walking through a cloud like the one that hung throughout that week, it seemed like I would never forget each tiny detail of every second. One year later, possibly as one of the mind’s coping mechanisms to bury trauma, the details have faded. But some remain prominent.

I am the youngest of three boys and the brother who passed was in the middle. The day of his memorial, I knew I needed my eldest brother on one side and a parent on the other. Unmarried and single, those pillars would help to prop me up. After expressing this to my mother, she worked on the choreography which surprised me at its complexity. I had no idea the placements, hierarchy, and etiquette involved. Apparently, his widow should have the place of honor on the inside aisle of the first row of family, but our eldest brother was speaking so also needed to be on an aisle. In the end it was all sorted, after much talking amongst family, with my brother to one side and my mom on the other.

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As the crowd rose for the arrival of the family and we entered to approach our rows at the front, the rise of uncontrollable tears burned my eyes. Standing in place as the rest of our close and extended family walked in, I didn’t dare turn behind me to face the crowd who had come to pay respects. Almost as soon as I stopped walking, without thinking, I grabbed my remaining big brother’s hand and held it tight. He’s ten years older than I am and so surely must have held my hand when I was little, but I honestly can’t remember and I know it hasn’t happened in this way since. But the middle was gone, only the big and the little left. He didn’t react, didn’t look over, didn’t ask what I was doing. He simply held it back as we stared ahead silently waiting for the service that no one wanted to begin, as the tears rolled down my face.

Our minds and bodies are amazing things. In order to protect us, our minds will shove down something traumatic or hurtful but our bodies remember what the conscious mind can’t. Just because something is hidden, doesn’t mean it’s gone. And when it comes to a point where we can go no further, our bodies will try to remind us.

Over the course of my life, so many comments, events, and traumas have been pushed to the graveyard of my mind. What I’m slowly realizing is that I have to actively go after them, dig them up, to release them. Otherwise, nothing changes. Oprah has a great quote (I think maybe she got it from Maya Angelou) that I’ll paraphrase. We all have a voice in the back of our mind that begins as a whisper. If you ignore it, it will turn into a yell. If you still ignore it, you hit a brick wall. To me, traumatic events are the same. You either actively work through them, dissect them, grow from them, or you ignore them at your own peril.

I don’t want to ignore the grief of Wayne’s passing. When the waves of grief come, I want them to carry me wherever they lead, then set me back down on the sand. I want to remember his body-shaking belly laugh, his courage in the face of adversity, his tender heart. I want to remember the tiny details of the week after his passing and his memorial.

And now I know the perfect thing to do today. I’m going to have a pimento cheese sandwich and a slice of chocolate cake. Two of his favorites.

A slice of his life, and a portion of his obituary:

Wayne Cameron Merritt (June 25, 1975-April 10, 2025) passed peacefully in Dallas in the home he grew up in with his wife and family at his bedside. Born with partial sight fully lost at the age of 11 and a rare genetic disease which caused life-long health complications, rather than let the circumstance of his congenital conditions define him, he defied them.

A life-long lover of music, Wayne joined his Junior High marching band to play the saxophone and the euphonium. In High School, he drove a farm truck across a Paris, Texas ranch. In his 20’s, he loved riding on the back of his friend’s motorcycle and the two jumped off a cliff into Lake Travis.

During college years, Wayne attended a rigorous training program at the Colorado Center for the Blind, which included applications he would bring to his later working life. He received a B.A.A.S. in Applied Technology from the University of North Texas. His professional career included 16 years working for the Criss Cole Rehabilitation Center in Austin, Texas where he helped the blind and visually impaired prepare to navigate a lifetime with blindness.

Above all, Wayne had a belly laugh that sounded like a car trying to start, a sweet and sensitive soul, and a deeply felt love for anything chocolate. He also frequently laughed at his own jokes, and we love him for it.

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On Monday, I found myself smiling at strangers on the subway. This is not typical behavior, especially after walking through Times Square.

As I sat on the R train headed to Flatiron and then Gramercy Park, there was an unexpected moment of bliss. It was a beautiful day as I walked to the north end of Times Square to catch the train, a favorite musician was being interviewed on a favorite podcast in my ears (Robyn on Las Culturistas), and I was going vintage shopping. (For those wondering, Vintage Thrift Shop and Cure Thrift Shop, both ridiculously good) As the day lay ahead of me, the city felt open and even I, the person who feels no shame walking through a family photo because the sidewalk is not your personal Sears photo studio, felt no umbrage for the typically impossibly annoying crowds.

Something about the confluence of these things and the thrill of the thrift hunt, not knowing what was about to be found, surged through me as I bounced along with the train, smiling at my fellow travelers like a crazy person.

Living in New York City is strange. It isn’t only the fact that we’re living on top of each other, or the dance of navigating a sidewalk while walking at a New York pace while pretending to ignore the person behind you having a conversation with someone only they can see, or that here you can be anyone and, thankfully, many people take the city up on that to reinvent themselves allowing others to do the same. It’s the things you notice about neighbors who live across the street and you never meet.

A couple of years ago, I rediscovered a love for the show Murder, She Wrote. There are streaming platforms that dedicate a channel to this time capsule and show it all day, every day, 24/7. After coming across one of these, I entered a period where I would watch it constantly. It was on in the background while working from home, as a wind down laying in bed waiting for my sleep aid to kick in, even on vacation in L.A. Great portions of days were spent in my friend’s garage guest room lazing on his futon in between dinners and catch ups with the people I was there to visit. Something about the 80’s/90’s nostalgia, when people still dressed well to fly, ladies removed their clip-on earrings to take a call, and handsets were still connected by a curly cord to the receiver, that invited me to put aside the cacophony outside my window and reenter Jessica Fletcher’s world.

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It could have been under Mrs. Fletcher’s influence, although admittedly I’ve always been nosy, that I started taking more notice of the people in the apartments across the street. That’s when I found the particular kind of relationship you can only have in New York, one where both people are present but only one of them knows it exists.

From my third floor apartment, I noticed the people who never open their curtains. The couple who recover each night by sitting next to each other on the sofa to watch television. The guy on the fifth floor whose blinds are always shut except for when he opens them in one window to stand shirtless in front of it showing off his very impressive physique. My working theory is that he does it when working out, so no shirt, and stands in front of the window AC unit in between sets.

Then there’s the guy who lives in the building directly across from me, also on the third floor. For a long time his windows were completely bare, no curtains or blinds. As I worked from home often, I noticed he did, too. I could see him sitting at his desk in the living room during the day, and the top of his head poking above the back of the sofa while he laid down, watching TV and scrolling on his phone at night.

I started to recognize his routine without meaning to. Not deliberately, but in the way you notice when something is missing. After a while, it started to feel less like looking into a stranger’s apartment and more like checking in.

For a time, I decided he was in a long-distance relationship. He would take video calls late at night, maybe it was a work call to the West Coast but I preferred the version that was more personal. He had the same weekend visitor a few times who was very clearly not platonic. Months later, he covered one window, then the other. Not all at once, but gradually. Enough that I noticed the difference before I realized what had changed. Less of his life was on display. Recently, I noticed his light was left off for an extended period like he was out of town. The weeks stretched on and, surprisingly, I started to get worried about him. I found myself looking for the light when I walked into my own living room, hoping to see it lit again. Finally one night, the light was back on but after a few days I looked over to notice a new face peeking out from behind the curtain, unfamiliar and oddly intrusive.

On the last night of March, his overhead light was bright and caught my eye as I looked out to see the curtains had been taken down. It isn’t a perfect view directly into his living room, but now there was nothing left on the walls and I couldn’t see any furniture. It took a moment longer than it should have to register what I was seeing. As I slowly realized the next day was the first of the month, it became clear he had moved out. Again, I was surprised at my reaction. I was disappointed in a way that didn’t quite make sense.

We never met but somehow I believed we could be friends. That’s the thing about New York, you can build entire relationships out of fragments, and the city never corrects you. It’s too full of possibilities to even notice.

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Over my time in Guatemala in my early twenties, I was able to travel and see much of the country. In my parents’ second-hand SUV, we drove from Guatemala City to places a world away from the year I had just spent living in New York City. On a few occasions, this venturing took us northwest to a city in the western highlands.

Smoke billowed out from the open doors of the whitewashed church walls that dominate the main square. The church is made of large, heavy stones and brick, looking as if it will withstand any disaster brought by man or nature. It isn’t a particularly tall building, one story, but the columns molded into the facade, the cavernous height of the ceilings inside, and the steps that lead up to it on the raised platform it’s built on from the square below make it an imposing and austere reminder of our smallness. The clean white of the structure stands in stark contrast to the deep blue sky behind it and the colorful Mayan garments worn by the people slowly drifting in and out.

Iglesia de Santo Tomás was built by the Spanish in 1545 as part of their continuing effort to colonize and convert the Mayan populations in Chichicastenango, now known affectionately as Chichi. Bringing their faith, believing it to be the only one, colonizers tried to adjust the religious sites of the Maya to make for a seamless transition. The church isn’t built on a hill, it’s built on a pre-Columbian temple platform. Each of the eighteen steps that lead up to the front door are representative of one month of the Mayan calendar year, time and the passage of time playing an integral role in religious practice.

As the Mayans were murdered for their noncompliance and nonbelief, they were forced to adopt Catholicism. In order to keep their ancient beliefs alive and stave off death, some feigned their newly adopted European religion and used it as a veil to continue the practice of beliefs given by their ancestors on this holy site. Even today, as regular services stick to conventional Catholicism, a hybrid religion bringing elements of the Catholic dogma and Mayan gods can be seen. Walking into this church is to walk back in time; stone walls, clouds of incense smoke, candles, and offerings to a swirling entity made up of ancient gods and the one brought by colonizers.

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Below the church is a large market bursting the seams of the central town square. A bustling crowd flows through small alleyways created by stalls selling local produce, food, flowers, and handmade goods. Getting lost is easy but the Iglesia provides a northstar to regain your bearings, when you can find it between the heavy cloth used as roofs to the stalls and hangs over the passageways, an attempt to block the sun that can be so unforgiving here. Women and children sell flowers, pushing wheelbarrows through the crowds or setting up shop on the church steps. Again, the church provides a beautiful backdrop of white allowing the colors of the flowers, mirrored in the design and colors of traditional clothing seen everywhere, to come to life.

Imagine the most colorful, bright, verdant blooms you’ve ever seen. Explosions of yellow, red, pink, purple, orange, blue made more vibrant by the light of day so you aren’t sure if you’re squinting from the sunshine or the reflection of the sun in the colors before you. Now, you are surrounded by these colors, market flower stalls and sellers with an armful, bucketful, or cartful are everywhere. At the bottom of the stone stairs leading up to the commanding church, buckets full of flowers sit beside sellers as they rest their legs. Everyone is wearing traditional Mayan clothing woven in the same colors as the fragrant blooms, patterns aged not by generations but by millennia. This is what it’s like to live in technicolor.

I quickly learned to be stealthy while attempting to take pictures of the locals, if you ask permission it will likely not be granted and if you don’t, you will be greeted by anger and stern words providing remnants of the Mayan belief that to take a picture, you are also taking a soul. Perhaps I should have been more respectful but the impertinence of youth overtook the desire to adhere to local custom. Reflecting on it now, it is a derivative of the attitude held by the colonizers. That, in a way, I know better than you.

Walking up and down the market corridors with a camera held down at my side, careful not to lift to aim but rather taking silent photos along the way. The photos became a study of daily life taken closely but candidly. A young girl with her shoulders hunched, back slightly bent, focused on a bouquet of flowers. An older woman taking a moment to rest, sitting halfway up the eighteen steps, flowers for sale laid before her, smoke surrounding her, and a cloth covering her mouth and nose. A man holding up a row of necklaces for inspection dangling from his forearm, trying to lock a purchase from tourists.

The people from Chichi who stand out in my mind are the women. The older women with weather-worn and tanned skin, deep wrinkles making the expressions they wear all the more animated. Eyes soaked in hard-won wisdom. Piercing glances that make you stand straighter, wishing you could drink in their experience, knowing within each of these women lies an ancestral and lived understanding of everything around us. The young girls selling flowers, bracelets, or whatever they can. Youth visible on their faces but already beginning to view the world like the generations of women before them, an all too early skepticism forming behind slightly narrowed eyes.

At the time, there could have been no greater foil against me. The nature of life in that region, at least at that time, dictated that an early acquaintance of helping the family make ends meet was a reality for many. Although I was working through the existential questions of who I was and who I wanted to be, I was not forced into adulthood in that way.

More than twenty years after exploring the famous church and market of Chichi, in many ways I still feel like that twenty-two, twenty-three year old. Even with much more experience gained, the love, loss, grief, and joy that has passed through me in the years since, I can feel the heat of the sun in the open-air market. The wide-eyed wonder of being in a new place. Taking my mind back there, I want to tell that young man that he will figure it out. He will find himself. To enjoy this strange detour and stop caring what other people might say. He doesn’t know that around the corner, just when he thinks he’s fallen back into a version of life he once ran from, the world is going to open up.

I can still feel the pull to make sense of it all; to frame it, name it, hold it in a way that feels complete. But not everything yields to that kind of understanding. Some things remain layered, partially seen, resistant to being reduced into something clean. Some things aren’t meant to be gathered into nice little boxes or binaries, they exist whether you understand them or not. I moved through that place believing I was observing it objectively, clearly. What I was beginning to learn, though I didn’t know it yet, was how much I couldn’t see.

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If you had asked me a few years ago what the meaning of life is, I likely would have answered with absolute certainty: community. And yet, most nights were spent at home, exhausted from the day and unwilling to fight LA traffic to see friends, likely with a glass of wine and streaming something. The small circles of community I built didn’t grow, instead I was up-to-date on the latest pop culture and was accruing way too many loyalty points at my local wine store.

Community is a concept I’ve been thinking about for a good while, possibly even bordered on obsession, at times. I found it fascinating the innumerable ways in which one person can have and experience community; life is a venn diagram of community with countless interlocking circles.

But now it seems to me that to ask the question “What is the meaning of life?,” the answer lies within the question. The meaning of life is meaning. It starts with the questions that we hear around us all the time: What makes you happy? What brings you joy? It is discovering the answers to those questions and then creating meaning out of the answers.

To be clear, community is incredibly important to this so we should not discard it as a separate entity rather, community is an expression of meaning. If nothing brings you greater joy than model trains, then create meaning for yourself and your life around model trains. There, you will find a like-minded community of other model train enthusiasts and you have found an expression of your meaning in the model train enthusiast community. Your job doesn’t need to be building, buying, and selling model trains, it doesn’t need to be your livelihood but it absolutely can be the meaning of your life.

And we don’t need to think that any one person has only one meaning of life; like great loves, we can have many in a lifetime. But in order for us to be centered as human beings, we must keep in focus what gives us meaning, and then actively work to discover and create community and purpose around it.

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One way in which to experience meaning is through ritual practice. I didn’t grow up in the Catholic faith, although I have an admiration for the time-honored practices that dictate the practice of the faith. Not to say I agree with everything, but it astonishes me to think the traditions have been developed over 2,000 years. There is something so humbling about walking into a cathedral with soaring rafters, the smell of old incense seeped into the architecture of awe, and the echo that makes small sounds big and the space even more grand. The incantations, the acts meant to raise within practitioners human remembrance of the divine. The search for the divine that led to a discovery within one’s own self, to discover something hidden until awakened.

This is not a case for Catholicism or even religion at all, but one for finding and honoring your own rituals, dare we call it self care. And what is ritual but the repetition of an act, the speaking of a piece of text, and the return to it each day, week, month, or year. I believe within the reproduction of these practices over and over again, they become of a second nature allowing the practitioner to use it to release the mind of distraction and tune into a mental frequency that isn’t allowed as we’re streaming a movie, answering emails, or driving through traffic.

Practically anything can become ritualistic and for many people, it has nothing to do with religion. If you can’t live without sitting in silent peace sipping a cup of coffee before the busy day begins, need a hot bath to relax after a taxing day, or regularly sit on a patch of grass to feel the sun and close your eyes for a moment, you are practicing a ritual that is very individualistic and personal to you. These are the ways in which we make sense of the chaos of the world around us, center ourselves, and search for meaning within our daily lives.

Beyond the purely personal, we regularly practice rituals within the communities we inhabit and these center us just as much as meditation might. Through a regular dinner with a specific group, daily phone calls with your best friend, or even a book club, you are practicing ritual within your community. After a while, these become second nature and if you miss one or two of these practices, your mind and body will notice the difference. We long to experience community and be an active part of it.

In my own life, I’ve recently begun a ritual each night. When I’m able to resist the allure of the distraction of numbness brought with catching up on the latest streaming movie or show, or the numbness of a couple glasses of wine turning to a couple more, or a combination of the two, I make a pot of tea and sit at my kitchen table. There, I read or journal, and I find the thoughts I’ve been wrestling with, or the frustrations that come from battling my inner saboteur, are able to come through. They come through the fog, often presenting a new idea or solution that hadn’t previously occurred to me. Would I have found this thought had I been buzzed on red wine watching Netflix? I’ll venture to say very likely not.

Discovering, expressing, experiencing meaning isn’t a passive pursuit, it requires constant work and will not happen fully inside ourselves. We must reach out and engage our community, have conversations, really listen (not just practice silence waiting for the chance to speak) because a great sense of meaning comes as a reflection from others. Through our own search, we learn from others and they learn from us. And this, my friends, is why we’re all here together, right here, right now, sharing this space together.

Consider this a green light to view dinners, coffees, catchups with friends not as an indulgence but as a ritual. To find what centers you while alone and with community, then return to it again and again.

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My mother could probably correct me here, but I think I started to want glasses somewhere around junior high. My case then (and now), why would anyone not want them? Intelligence, but wearable. A nice fashion accessory to boot.

In my middle twenties during an annual eye exam, the doctor imparted the news that I had an astigmatism in both eyes that came with a tiny little baby prescription that might be helpful for distance, night driving, things like that. That was it, no definition of what it meant. Apparently, I already looked smart without the glasses and the doctor assumed that I knew what was going on. Ignorance intact, I gleefully ran to the nearest eyeglasses store and got my first pair that I proudly peacocked and the slow building of my collection began. It was all roses until the inevitable moments when someone would want to try them on and then loudly report they were fake. Deeply offended, I would respond, “They’re for distance! I have an astigmatism! In both eyes!!”

A favorite pair of glasses back when my mustache was way too big.

Over the years and thanks to getting older, my prescription has inched up and the beloved face accessory is needed most particularly at the end of the day, going to the theater or a movie, or at night. But it wasn’t until my early forties that I learned I see the world differently.

While getting a haircut with my wonderful barber, conversation drifted to the glasses (it may have been about the time I received my first pair of prescription sunglasses and couldn’t stop talking about how great they were, or I was just preemptively defending myself and my “need”). When I inevitably shared the grave diagnosis of astigmatism, she replied that her wife also had it.

She then asked if I saw halos around lights at night. “Oh yeah,” I answered. “Wait, do you NOT see that?”

It was the first moment I realized one way in which I physically saw the world differently than others. It hadn’t occurred to me that something so constant, so ordinary, wasn’t shared by everyone.

Once this wormed its way into my brain, I started to wonder what else is there? More than a Freudian power of the unconscious or Jungian collective unconscious, this made me think of a power of the unconscious perspective. An individual perspective I never thought to question as being universal.

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When recently considering this again, and unable to quiet the inner chatter of my mind, something else occurred to me, is constant commentary normal? Are there people who experience stillness and quiet in their minds, or does everyone have these nonstop, rambling, sometimes topic-irrelevant detours happening in the background? A quick Google search assured me this is quite normal, which only slightly placated me. Apparently the only way to silence the chatter is through meditation, which I’ve only attempted a handful of times and failed horribly, due to the aforementioned and ridiculous inner dialogue with myself.

We move through the world often assuming that our own internal experience is shared, until something small proves that it isn’t. And I think this is where we get into trouble, assigning our perspectives as universal truths. In fact, we are not all operating from the same baselines. What is obvious to me, may not be obvious to them. I may think their reaction, or lack of a reaction, might mean something specific when in reality we might not be seeing the same thing. Not in a metaphorical sense (although that, too), but literally not perceiving the same input.

What if, at times, disagreement doesn’t come from difference in opinion but difference in experiences? Would that affect our reactions? If we come at it from this angle, would more people be more sympathetic?

But if our baselines vary, then everything built on top of it does, too. Then this complicates the advice we hand out so freely. The neat, packaged lines that assume a shared operating system. As if everyone grew up in an environment of unconditional love, or moves through life with manageable anxiety, or never felt they had to hide who they were, or had the luxury of some sort of financial safety net. For some, belonging is conditional, fragile, or never fully there. So me saying something flippant like, “Don’t worry, be yourself and you’ll find your people!” may not be comforting, but triggering based on the learned experience of constantly being the outcast.

I still see them, the halos. Soft rings of light around streetlamps at night, blurred at the edges. They haven’t changed, but now they carry a different weight. Not a flaw, just a quiet reminder that what feels shared often isn’t. That most of us are moving through slightly, or even largely, different versions of the same world.

Our job isn’t to try to make others see our version as reality, but to find out what their version looks like. To listen.

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Nebaj (ney-BACH)

One early morning years ago, leaving a remote village in the mountains of Guatemala, a single moment imprinted itself on my brain like the microscopic grooves etched into a vinyl record.

The sun had recently begun to rise, rays of light peeking above the short but steep mountains that circle like a pointed crown around the small village of Nebaj. Our early morning departure was needed to return to our home in Guatemala City. From this part of the country, a long drive was ahead of us from the western highlands returning south and slightly east to the bustling city. We had hours to go through the mountainous dirt road before we would hit the pavement that would take us winding through the countryside.

I was in the passenger seat with my father driving, my mother behind me. At 22 years old, I preferred to spend the morning in bed and the sleep I craved caked around my still squinting eyes. I was physically and emotionally tired, an already too familiar feeling that would stay with me for years to come. I had been in Guatemala for a little over a month, still learning the language but getting better at following conversations, although very much dependent on those around me to do most of the talking. I was an unmoored ship that needed my parents’ help to speak to the locals while my friends either had or were about to graduate college, start their careers, some even engaged to marry and beginning to plan very adult lives. I was living with my parents in a foreign country. Where my peers had embarked upon definable life paths, I felt my life was coming off the rails. I was then a college dropout, drifting with an uncertain future and I hated myself. If there is a stronger word than hate, then I felt that, too. At a time when all I wanted was to have an element of self truth, I was hiding an already well-versed suppression because the truth went against everything I was raised to believe. I wanted to think I was on a journey of self-discovery headed for a light bulb realization, but I wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge that truth.

We had just left the open square-shaped Spanish Colonial home near the center of town where we slept as guests the night before. In the near middle of nowhere, we began tracing our route through veiny streets, past the town square. Maybe this is a figment of false memory, but I remember being told at the time the square was under construction to add an underground parking garage. I can imagine the people who made decisions for the village were expecting an influx of outside interest, so wanted to anticipate and accommodate a horde of cars to ensure no visiting tourist money would be turned away. Possibly, they were building it first and hoped the tourists would come soon after, after being written up in a trendy guidebook. It would have been a financial sacrifice and last ditch effort to appease the ancient gods and keep alive one of the last places descendants of the Mayans still called home.

In either scenario, it was clear money was being spent on a cause that was long in coming, if at all. The hope of redemption for a community whose remote and picturesque location had been plagued by hundreds of years of pain. First brought centuries ago by European disease, a deadly and silent result of the Spanish colonizers who once streamed in on their own quest for the riches of land and gold. Then, and most recently, by the civil war with seemingly unending cycles of death from rebels and the former militaristic government. Men and boys of appropriate-enough age were forced to join the revolutionary forces to fight the government or face death. On the arrival of the military seeking out these rebel forces, men and boys of appropriate-enough age were killed upon suspicion of being the elusive guerrillas. And the cycle continued for thirty-six long years, from 1960 until 1996.

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I can appreciate the pride the locals must feel in their home, the setting is truly moving and there is no justice in simply using words to describe it. If you can make the long trek, you will be welcomed. This much is certain.

However, in order to descend upon Nebaj, one must traverse through and down a dense mountain range, lush and steep. Approaching the town, I marveled at the expert farmers who passed down from generation to generation the best way to milk the land following thousands of years of ancestral use. In life, one must take the lot one has been given, and for many of these farmers that meant tilling land at nearly impossible angles. As if it were me hanging there, I was terrified for the men I witnessed dangling from long ropes, one end tied around their waists and the other around a heavy stake in the ground. This suspended dance of fostering and harvesting crops was carefully performed on perfectly parallel rows. In the unforgiving sun, men tended to their families’ livelihood with the constant reminder of what an unsure step or carelessly attached rope could bring. Once you descend through the spectacle of these dancing farmers, you come upon a town built of stone in the style of the Spanish who colonized it.

The morning was crisp and slightly wet-fallen. Dewy grass sent up graceful evaporating smoke through the broken rays of fragmented light. The heavy air was full of glowing lines as if left by a 3-D highlighter, just beginning to follow the peak down from the rising sun on the other side of the low mountains to greet the start of the day. The magnificent sight of a town that burned in splendor each morning. Hovering large and bright, it seemed certain the sun lived just on the other side of the nearest mountain. Maybe we could reach this pot of gold if we hurried fast enough.

As we crept to the edge of town in our second-hand four-wheel-drive SUV, we were slow going to the arched black iron gate that proudly declared the town limits, my father careful to avoid the gradual increase in foot traffic. I sleepily began to notice more and more indigenous Mayans, in this region they are Quiché, on their march toward the town center. We were leaving on a market day when men, women, and children who lived in the sparsely populated mountains were trekking their familiar path to buy and sell. Men dragged carts, some empty and some overflowing. Women, who carried baskets perched atop graceful crowns, were draped in amazingly bright and beautiful colors that were intricately woven together in the style of their tribe.

It wasn’t uncommon for this delicate pace to be accompanied by an infant on a hip or, if the mother was lucky enough for the lightened load with a child old enough to walk, a trail of tiny joyful steps made by plump little legs behind the guiding light of the traditional Mayan skirt two steps ahead. These handmade garments were created out of tradition from a pattern developed over an untold number of years. To see these intricate designs is to see the visual representation of a cultural history older than Western Civilization as we know it. Colors mirroring the vibrant flowers that grow plentifully in the area, they were brilliant as ever.

The air was still cold but by now the grass-covered ground seemed to be boiling as the sun burned off the water droplets with more fervor. Even under the wet blanket of night, the dew isn’t able to penetrate the white ash-like dirt of these mountain roads. Perpetually dry, the floating dust clouded every molecule here. Nearly every road in the town was unpaved. The few cars, more commonly the livestock that roamed here, and anyone simply taking in the air with a walk around town or rushing around daily life, meant a certain and immediate plume of hanging dust clouds would be left in their wakes.

As we passed under the gate on our way home, the moment came as I struggled to hide my emotion from view. The air seemed more agitated than just a few minutes before, and I imagined there to be an unseen car that had cleared the way before us as we were surrounded by hanging earth in the air. In a split second, we moved from one side of the gate to the other into nearly zero visibility where the road quickly disappeared before us as we began the ascent that would take us out of Nebaj and back into the mountains. The road bent and we suddenly were eye to eye with the rays of the morning sun. A steady stream of backlit Quiché appeared on the side of the road, coming into view from nowhere on their advance to the village market. They paraded a worn path from who knows how far away to arrive here on time with the rising sun, a triumphant walk through a difficult and winding course carrying what they could to sell, barter, or trade. Soon enough, they would reverse and return home at the end of the day only to repeat this journey again and again and again.

The beauty of this sight seared into my eyes, bearing a brief witness to a version of life I would never know or lead. These figures slowly emerging from clouds of nothing, blessed by the sun behind them, appeared to me as if angels. I wondered what their home looked like? Did they have running water? Indoor plumbing? What would their struggle to put food on the table feel like day in and day out? I considered, as I have at many points in life, what community must mean to them. How, even in the harshest conditions, life trudges on and babies are born. Mothers love their children. Smiles are traded and laughs are shared. Our lives and backgrounds couldn’t be more different, and yet how different could they be? As my throat became tight, I swallowed hard and fought to keep the tears down. What right did I have to complain about absolutely anything?

I can’t explain the transcendence I felt then but can only feel gratitude for a slice of time I will never forget. For a fleeting speck, we were all hanging onto this huge rock hurtling through space together.

The regularity of ritual for these people is not unlike the one I was raised in: we are all growing up, growing together, sometimes growing apart, and doing the best we can for those we love. There I found a mirror that showed me a reflection of polar opposites staring into each other.

I wondered what they saw when they looked at us. Today, none of those people would have any reason to remember seeing us on that road. But I still carry them with me.

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For a short while, about four months or so, I lived in Guatemala. After signing up for a three-to-four year term, my parents moved there in a mid-life career change to become missionaries. In my early twenties, I was coming off of my first year living in New York City and it felt like my mind was screaming at me but I couldn’t quite make out the message. At the time, moving to Central America, where I had never been, seemed like a reasonable decision. As one does.

There are memories but very few journal entries from that time, and I fear much of my experience has been lost to history. Rummaging through one of my many unorganized boxes looking for a USB cord, I found the small journal I used at the time. Most of it is empty, only the scattering of thoughts that barely fill the first pages. They are notes written by a younger version of me who, while undergoing some sort of change, couldn’t or didn’t want to decipher that period and the choices I needed to make.

There is an entry recounting accompanying a doctor on one of her clinic rotations. The doctor, Susan, lived in the same gated community in Guatemala City as my parents, and I remember the short journey we made outside of the city. As the highway wound into the mountains and out of the bustling city, we turned off onto a dirt road and after only a few minutes I found myself in a small village surrounded by lush nature and unable to hear the closeness of the city we just left. This version of a suburb was a collection of huts with no running water and earthen floors. It was unbelievable. It was both as far away from any semblance of city life, while also being situated directly beside it.

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Here is my journal entry:

I went to a village clinic where Susan works. The facilities were quite surprising, very nice, big, clean. I spent most of my time sitting and watching Susan work. Most everyone was very gracious, some smelled. Susan said a lot of the time she could tell where someone lived by the way she smelled. The village down the road had running water and this one didn’t. The other doctor, Anita, asked me if I wanted to hold a baby. A round infant bundled in traditional fabrics was going to get pneumonia and needed a breathing treatment. As I held her, first children came to stare through the doorway at the gringo holding the baby. Then some adults came. Before I began the treatment, while Anita was setting things up, the child began to cough. At the end of a light coughing fit, one last big cough. This pushed out a nice sized fart. It was short and to the point so I couldn’t tell if anything was behind it. Maybe I should have been more worried as the children here don’t wear diapers. But with those huge brown eyes that had no idea what I was and just wanted to stare back at me, my attention went elsewhere. I didn’t even mind the coin on my crotch when I stood up.

From my memory and the few other entries, my time in Guatemala was shaped by intense worry, self-doubt, and depression. At that point, I had dropped out of college and looking from a certain angle, my life seemed to have veered out of control. But there were also these experiences that seemed other worldly, profound, even transcendent. Who was I to question the path I was on that brought me to a place not on any map where I absolutely fell for this beautiful child? I can still feel her in my arms, the weight of her on my lap as I held the mask to her face that delivered her breathing treatment. She never fussed, just looked up with huge and inquisitive eyes.

Reasonable doubt is a term most are probably familiar with, having popped up in basically every courtroom drama ever. It is also something I’m constantly trying to remind myself of and practice.

Some doubt is expected or even warranted in many situations; my struggle is with overwhelming doubt. A touch can be healthy, keeps you on your toes and the surprise of something not working out hopefully won’t floor you. It can also sharpen judgement and acceptance of risk. But being consumed with doubt, at least with me, is conducive to nothing but paralysis. Being static. Moving only with the passing of time, not with progression. In excess, doubt freezes judgement.

Reflecting on that period in Guatemala, was there growth? Progression? Absolutely. Would I have progressed further if I confronted the unspoken and made an active effort to create the life I wanted and deserved? Abso-freakin-lutely. Miles further.

But undoubtedly, doubt is an innate plague of being human. Centuries ago in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare wrote:

	Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.

At twenty-two, I didn’t yet understand that doubt could quietly steal years. I only knew that somehow I had ended up in a village clinic in the Guatemalan mountains, holding a baby who trusted me completely. It may have felt like veering wildly off-course but looking back, it was maybe the most interesting thing I could have done.

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Author’s note: I’ve long been a fan of Christopher Isherwood and in these past few months, I’ve been reading more of his work I hadn’t yet: The Memorial, Down There on a Visit, The World in the Evening. Some of his work is strictly fiction, but many of his stories and characters have been taken from his own life. In The Berlin Stories, the protagonist (also named Christopher) makes a statement,

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

Isherwood created a passive observer narrator, able to witness only what can be seen, unable to enter the minds of characters to report out emotion, thought, or desire.

Although I have, at times, gone beyond this style to tap lightly into my thoughts or memories, I’ve tried to stay true to it throughout The Abacus. Isherwood as inspiration, I simply liked this approach and wanted to give it a go. But the truth behind the veil is that it allowed me to step back and, in a way, examine the experience as if it were not my own. To uninhabit and walk beside the emotion rather than run toward it.

For this, the final part of this story, it is time to step back into it.

After more than four hours and thousands of tiny punctures, the anxiety had disappeared. All that remained was the simple desire for it to stop. The only thing I wanted from Elliot was release from my supine position.

When I walked into the shop hours before, I wondered if the final image might spark a flood of emotion. But now it seemed the tears might come from sustained repetition of little pricks, like the accumulation of drops in water torture.

So maybe unsurprisingly, as Elliot placed the final dots of the hand poke tattoo, the ten days at home returned as a collision of memories. Not chronologically, in fragments speaking over each other. My mind was trying to make order through the chaos of individual days and moments tumbling over each other. Being too late. Walking through fog. Trying to encapsulate an entire life in an obituary.

On a Tuesday, I was taking the train from New York to Washington, DC for a one-night work trip. The call from my parents came as I answered emails in the slow sway of the trip south. They were calling to report that on recommendation from Wayne’s at-home hospice nurse, he was coming home. He had days left, probably a week or maybe even two, but no more. He was coming home, where all three of us boys grew up.

My psyche refused the weight of what was happening as the mists slowly rolled toward me. Refusing extended conversation with the excuse of a crowded train car, the call ended with promises of regular updates. Late the next day after returning to New York, Wednesday night, I booked my flight to Dallas for Thursday and repacked my suitcase. Updates carried no major change, only announcements of more sleep, sips of fluid. There were two options. I could leave very early in the morning, giving me little sleep and no opportunity to hand over my apartment keys to the person I hadn’t yet been able to identify to take care of my cat. I could also leave early in the afternoon, giving me the opportunity to drop keys and figure out the cat on the fly for my trip of uncertain length. I chose later – Wayne and I would still have at least days, a week.

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My nephew picked me up from the airport late in the afternoon the next day and after a strong hug, I asked if he had any updates. Nothing new while I was in the air, and he hadn’t heard anything, either. It took less than forty minutes to get to my parents’ house and as we pulled up, he parked to the side because there was no room left from the cars crowding the front.

Taking my suitcase out of the trunk, my eldest brother and a family friend, an extension of the family and close friend of my parents, walked across the yard to greet us. My sister-in-law came out of the house, stopping at the patio. Only to observe, not join. Long hugs were exchanged and releasing, I looked to my brother’s face. My own elongating in expectation, his was a garden hose bent to stop the water – pressure building on the other side of his eyes that he couldn’t release.

Searching for words that couldn’t come, I looked to the other face in front of me and back again. Eyes darting between eyes, examining expressions to read between the forehead lines, a strong and heavy hand softly landed on my shoulder.

“He’s gone.”

I took the later flight. I left the next day but I took the afternoon flight. I could have been there for his last hours, but my choice made me ninety minutes too late. He left around the time that I was on my final descent.

Bringing my suitcase to the front of the house and hugging my sister-in-law, the front door was open. As I silently stepped toward this portal to stillness, my mother appeared from behind the door and we embraced. No words. There was nothing to say yet. The seconds, maybe minutes, strung together and as I entered the house, I walked into solemn quietude. The air pressure was different. My body was carried not by will but by a magnetic pull toward the front bedroom where all three boys had lived at some point. Where the middle brother was lain at that moment, without being there.

He was sleeping. Mouth open in mid-snore, I saw him as I had seen a thousand times before. The water pressure I had just seen behind my eldest brother’s eyes outside was released through my own. I couldn’t have stopped the tears if I tried, but I didn’t.

After my first presidential campaign in 2012, the idea first came to me for a tattoo. I wanted something just for me, and thought Braille was a good choice. The campaign’s one-word motto could be a memory of that experience, a reminder to inhabit the word, and it had the added benefit of making me think of Wayne. One word that summed him up. And the Braille would honor him.

For years I thought about it but never did it. After Wayne’s death, a need replaced the desire. My first idea was of a collapsible cane in the shape of a ‘W’ with the word hidden inside it. But I decided against honoring him by using a tool he needed, something that could be a symbol of limitation. And I remembered the abacus. He always had that abacus.

At some point during the long process of the tattoo, Elliot asked why an abacus and why that word? I wanted to explain Wayne’s illness, about the way his progression had been defined by acute crisis and by persistence. The open heart surgery on his little two-year-old body, and the procedures that would follow. Learning to navigate a world not built for blindness. He had continued to get out of bed. This was not optimism, and it was not denial. It was continuation. The future was not avoided.

Instead, I simply answered, “It’s for my brother.”

As the final dots were made, my skin wiped clean, I walked to the mirror. In it, I saw the abacus held by my brother from boy to teenager to man, and within it, if you know where to look, the word he personified.

Hope.

Walking outside, rejoining a world unchanged and still baking in the summer heat, I carried with me Wayne’s hope. Joining the cacophony of the city and squinting through my sunglasses, I started back to the subway. As I began to sweat through my shirt, I whispered to my big brother, “Happy fiftieth birthday, Wayne.”

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Once, visiting my brother in Austin not long after he moved there, four of us were heading out to celebrate his birthday. My parents and I had driven down from Dallas, a three-hour trip through the late-June Texas heat. We stepped out of his apartment and onto the sidewalks of the complex. My father was already walking ahead, eager to cool the car down and get moving. My mother followed a few steps behind him. Wayne walked just behind her.

Squinting against the bright summer evening sun, I trailed the group in the typical teenage slump — I think I was about seventeen — of wishing I were anywhere else but heading to dinner with my family.

Wayne’s first seeing-eye dog, Tony, wouldn’t come for some years. He navigated with a cane, which was excellent for ground obstacles ahead, but useless for a threat from above. A tree just over 6 feet tall or so, with a manicured canopy of a half-dome, drifted its shape and hung out over the sidewalk. As his cane tap-tap-tapped the hot pavement, Wayne walked straight into it. Face first. It startled all of us, probably less than it startled Wayne.

He exhaled slowly while the leaves swayed to a stop, lowering himself onto a curb by an empty parking space. My mother bent down and sat beside him, her arm around his hunched shoulders. His quiet words were,

“Mom, I don’t want to be blind.”

A mother’s soft words of encouragement were murmured into this moment of defeat and I turned away as I felt the sting in my eyes, unsure of what to say. We went on to a dinner I don’t remember, but his words stay with me still.

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Maybe my anger began then. Maybe it began earlier, but that doesn’t matter. What does is that I took it upon myself to feel anger on his behalf. This walk to dinner remains a visceral representation of the heartache I felt for how he had to move through the world, and from that point forward I carried a quiet resentment. At the blindness itself, and at the world that made every sidewalk a hazard. But sometime in the year before his death, Wayne said something that complicated that anger. He said he had lived a great life, and was thankful for all of it.

Examining those diametric viewpoints shames me and, at times, confuses me. For years, decades, I carried the sorrow of hushed guilt that I could move in a way he couldn’t. I traveled the world. I moved across the country. I hated that I was experiencing things he never would or could. However, missing the forest for the trees, I overvalued the abilities of my own vision and undervalued the life he built. It was my own blindness.

Grief and gratitude seem like opposites, but I’m finding they show up together more often than you might expect, certainly more often than I expected. Being grateful for what remains during and after grief, knowing the end of the tunnel is near and still being thankful for everything that carried you through this magical existence, or simply being able to find moments of laughter as you walk through the pain.

These dichotomies are so important that life persistently forces the pairings on us: grief and gratitude, love and despair, pain and pleasure, success and failure. The high-school-locker-room-coach-pep-talk-style quote that once may have solicited an eye roll is what I now cling to, the valleys are what make the peaks. Every emotion is what makes us sentient, and it is impossible to cut off the tap of one without seeing the others slow to a trickle.

Wayne seemed to hold these extremes at once, while I’m still learning to accept them. He struggled, of course he did, but he loved his life and he wanted more of it.

, the singular poet who passed away last summer, wrote a beautiful piece among many, Love Letter from the Afterlife. I encourage you to read it in full but here are the opening chords that continue to strike my heart.

My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?

I still hold the memory of crouching beside his body after he left it, caressing his arm, but I also hold the embrace of his laugh and the joy that lived within him.

Boy, I sure do hope he’s with me now, experiencing the world in a way he couldn’t before – not because he didn’t create a beautiful life, I just think he’d get a kick out of it.

As the sound of his laugh echoes in my ear, I think he just might be.

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The needle entered George’s skin at a slight angle. The sound arrived first — a slight squeak as Elliot positioned his hand and nitrile gloves pressed against George’s leg, followed by the muted percussion of a needle striking, pressing then piercing dimpled skin, pulling the needle out, and repeat. Each impact was deliberate. Nothing in a handpoke tattoo happened quickly. Elliot had explained this earlier, speaking about it with the measured seriousness of someone describing a procedure that could not be rushed without consequence.

George lay on his back, hands clasped on his stomach. His gaze fixed on the old lofted ceiling of the studio: pipes against cement slabs, air ducts, inner workings meant to remain hidden now in full view. He breathed carefully, trying to match his exhale to the rhythm of the strikes.

The pain was present but faint — a precise prick that registered, then dulled almost immediately, as if the body, once informed, decided it did not require repetition. George noted this with mild surprise. He had expected more. He had prepared himself for worse.

Elliot worked with focused neutrality. His attention remained on depth, and spacing. George sensed, correctly, that Elliot was not thinking about him as a person, not about why the image mattered, not about Wayne. He was thinking about the line. About the exact placement of dots. About the completed picture.

George found this reassuring.

The first section took longer than expected. Elliot moved slowly, building the outline dot by dot, returning to areas he had already touched, adjusting pressure in increments too small to be visible. George counted the strikes without meaning to, then lost count, then began again. The counting gave way to something else — a narrowing of focus that excluded everything except the sound, the contact, the ceiling above him. The clock on the other side of the studio clicked its slow march forward.

Wayne entered the space the way he often did now — not announced, not invited, but persistent.

George’s attention shifted without aversion. The room remained the same. The needle continued its work. But Wayne was present all the same, carried in by the antiseptic smell of the studio, by the arrangement of tools laid out with clinical order, by the quiet insistence of waiting.

The needle struck again. George’s leg tightened slightly, then relaxed. He adjusted his breathing without looking down.

George felt the sting sharpen briefly, then recede. He shifted his weight, just enough to ease pressure in his lower back.

Elliot paused.

“Try to stay still,” he said — not unkindly, not sharply. Just an observation delivered in a neutral tone.

George nodded. He hadn’t realized he had moved.

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The pause broke something. Not the rhythm of the work, Elliot resumed almost immediately, but the interior flow George had settled into. The pain registered more clearly now. They had been at it nearly two hours and while Elliot’s pressure remained the same, the feeling of each needle prick hadn’t changed, the accumulation of being repeatedly prodded was becoming increasingly noticeable. Not overwhelming, but insistent. Less a prick than a sustained irritation, like a heat that did not dissipate as quickly as before.

The work continued.

Wayne’s medical history returned in fragments rather than sequence. Two holes in the heart. Vision narrowing, then gone. Asthma. Diabetes. Injections. A genetic disease so rare that even specialists hesitated before naming it. Pulmonary hypertension. Too much blood, always too much, flooding organs never meant to handle that volume.

George did not catalogue these facts so much as feel their weight. The repetition of crisis. The way one diagnosis branched into others, creating a system so complex it resisted summary. Attempting to list Wayne’s medications could feel and sound like reciting an incantation in a language no one truly understood.

Early hospital visits were frenetic. From birth, there were innumerable tests. Corrective heart surgery at the age of two. Constant check-ups, medications, recalibrations. Born with only partial sight, he became fully blind at the age of eleven. He started middle school with a guidance therapist — not for academic guidance, but to teach him how to navigate to each class in a much larger building every summer that would continue until graduation and then on a college campus. Gradually, the pattern clarified.

As he entered adulthood, his health and administration of treatments stabilized. But in his 40s, slowly, almost imperceptibly at the time, a decline was introduced. Overnight stays stretched quietly into two nights, then three. Finally, a coma and a six-week stay in an Austin ICU that prompted the attending physician to announce to the family, “You need to start preparing for end of life.” Then, a move back to his hometown of Dallas to be near family who could assist with care. But when the inevitable complication arose and a purposeful avoidance of the ER and possible hospital admission steered him to urgent care, it no longer meant treatment and release; it meant escalation. A recommendation delivered carefully but firmly: you should go to the ER immediately. Again measured in days, sometimes weeks.

Each stay carried the promise of improvement and the slow erosion of that promise. Time dissolved into procedures. Days were counted by rounds, by shifts, by which nurse happened to be on duty. Wayne adapted. He learned how to sleep in fragments. He learned which requests were honored and which would be acknowledged and then deferred. He endured with a steadiness that impressed and gave hope to everyone around him.

But endurance, like all resources, proved finite.

The moment when enough became enough arrived without melodrama. No heated confrontation. Just accumulation, the realization that each stay extracted something and returned less than it took. That the hospital was no longer a place he went to recover, but a place that held him while things worsened incrementally and only the promise of temporary patches was delivered. Desperate urgings and conversations with his parents did not change his resolve, and so Wayne worked individually through the close and concentric circles of community around him. He would no longer be admitted to the hospital. He would begin at-home hospice care. When his time was chosen, he wanted a DNR. Do Not Resuscitate.

Hospice care was not chosen out of despair, but clarity.

It eliminated waiting rooms. A hospice nurse came to him. He was able to stay at home. Time softened. Decisions became smaller and more local. The body was no longer treated as a complex equation to be solved, alleviating any immediate pain was the primary and only objective. And with that decision, Wayne expressed solace — not at hurrying the process of dying, but relief at no longer wondering. To this point, he didn’t wonder if he would have to go to the hospital again, he wondered when and for how long. His sole focus became the quality of any remaining time, not extension of time at the sacrifice of quality. This decision did not prolong his life — indeed, it may have hastened his departure — but it restored to him a sense of ownership over his own humanity.

The needle tapped. Dot by dot.

Wayne adapted. He always had. After college, he moved to Austin. He built a life that looked, from a distance, almost ordinary. He married. He worked. Music was constant — present through headphones, through speakers, in hospital beds. Music did not require sight. It asked nothing of his eyes.

George’s thigh twitched again, sharper this time. He caught it mid-motion, jaw tightening briefly.

Elliot lifted his hand. He wiped away ink and blood, tilted his head, studied the line, adjusted his angle.

“We’re good,” he said. “Just let me know if you need a break.”

George shook his head. Not now.

The pain no longer dulled immediately. It lingered, spreading outward in small flares. The counting returned, more deliberate. The ceiling blurred slightly, then came back into focus.

Eventually, Wayne reached the point where endurance stopped being a virtue and became a cost.

George felt the sting sharpen again. He exhaled slowly, deliberately, resisting the urge to shift. The image was becoming clear — he could sense it even without seeing it. The beads emerging. The structure taking hold.

The work was not finished. It would not be finished for two more hours.

Wayne came to hate hospitals. The interruptions throughout the day that continued through the night. The loss of self-determination. The constant poking and prodding. The pain.

George remained on the table, breathing through the gathering pain, holding still as the needle continued its patient work — aware, now, that endurance was not something given freely, but something that had to be chosen again and again, one dot at a time.

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ICYMI:

At my home in New York City, I rarely go grocery shopping for more than a few days at a time. Not because I lack discipline or foresight, but because carrying multiple bags through a crowded Manhattan sidewalk quickly becomes a philosophical exercise. You begin the walk optimistic. A block later your fingers go numb and the tote bags cut into your shoulders. If you have to walk an avenue block, you are reconsidering every decision that led you here, including the idea that you needed both sparkling water and a butternut squash.

But there’s another reason I avoid stocking up: it removes choice.

Sure, I enjoy cooking. But I have no idea what is going to sound good four days from now. If the refrigerator is full of ingredients with a ticking expiration date, the menu has already been decided. Thursday’s dinner has been locked in by Tuesday’s ambition. Why eliminate the possibility of future snackies? This is New York, after all. If I want Thai, Ethiopian, dumplings, or fresh homemade pasta, it can magically show up at my door.

The entire city runs on this premise: unlimited choice and minimal inconvenience.

More broadly, our culture seems to be in the business of making everything easier. Almost anything can now be delivered directly to your door. Before the pandemic, I subscribed to an app that allowed you to schedule a massage at home. The masseuse would arrive with a portable table, oils, music, and once – courtesy of an especially entrepreneurial gentleman – a mobile wet-towel warmer for the final flourish. My muscles were kneaded back into submission and then wiped clean like an especially pampered entrée.

It was luxurious. It was efficient. It was also, in a strange way, absurd.

So many of the small frictions that used to shape everyday life have disappeared. The only phone number I still know by heart is the landline from my childhood home. I memorized it because I had to. As a teenager if I wanted to call someone, the number had to live somewhere in my brain. Now every contact sits quietly inside a device in my pocket, which means my brain has been permanently relieved of the burden.

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And that seems to be the general direction of things: remove the burden.

There is something undeniably wonderful about this. No one wants unnecessary suffering. Progress has given us medicine, comfort, convenience, and time we once would have spent hauling water or chopping wood.

But along with the inconveniences, what else are we missing?

In there is an apt essay Friction Is Required For Growth. Psychologists have made a similar point. One study found that happiness without meaning tends to produce a shallow life – pleasant, perhaps, but strangely empty. Needs are met, desires are satisfied, obstacles are minimized. Everything works smoothly.

And yet something essential seems to be missing.

If every inconvenience is eliminated, where exactly does meaning enter the picture? The good parts of life (pleasure) are given meaning and depth because of the bad bits (pain), not in spite of it.

Struggle is rarely enjoyable while it’s happening. It is heavy grocery bags cutting into your fingers. It is waiting, arguing, failing, getting a flat tire at 1am and never having changed a tire before (yep, I’m the guilty party on that one). It is the uncomfortable delay between wanting something and getting it.

These junctures have happened to me, as I suspect to you, more times than I care to admit. The moments seared in my memory most clearly weren’t the easy ones. They were the uncomfortable stretches where something wasn’t working yet – when I was unsure what came next, when the path forward felt slower than I wanted, when I would have happily traded the entire experience for a well-timed escape hatch. At the time it felt like delay. Later it looked suspiciously like growth.

These moments have a peculiar habit of becoming the most significant parts of our lives. Because as the saying goes, the only way out is through. And then once you’re in the light can you appreciate the dark.

The relationships that matter rarely arrive effortlessly. The work that shapes us is almost always difficult in the middle of it. Even the memories we hold most closely are often rooted in some form of resistance – loss, uncertainty, a challenge we weren’t entirely sure we could survive at the time.

In the moment, difficulty feels like an obstacle. Later, it begins to look more like a turning point.

The strange thing about struggle is that it rarely feels valuable at the time. It feels like inconvenience. But later, looking back, those were often the only places where anything meaningful actually happened. Everything else was just… easy.

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Today, time seems to be making itself known to me. I’m suddenly very aware it is now March and soon my birthday, and April will bring the first anniversary of my brother’s passing. It seems too quick, all of it. My mind can’t seem to catch up.

Apart from a few relatively short stints through the years, I’ve basically lived away from home since graduating high school. Those years were spent trying to discover the different versions of myself and narrowing the paths of possibilities, building a career, and moving quite literally coast-to-coast and back (occasionally, and only briefly, to another country). Through that time, an emotional distance formed between me and my past — I needed to forge a new identity away from the wounds of growing up gay in Texas. It looked like growth and in some ways it was. But it was also avoidance, an unconscious decision to let certain memories sit undisturbed.

Of my two older brothers, one had poor health since birth but after being stable for decades — although not completely without issue — a decline began. This brought him and his wife back to our hometown of Dallas from Austin, where he had been living happily since his 20s. After a professional setback and the onset of the pandemic, I also found myself moving back to Dallas from six years in Los Angeles and before that New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. It had probably been more than twenty years since all three brothers and our parents had lived only about thirty minutes from anyone else in the family circle. This made the increasingly more frequent hospital stays and visits no less scary, but comforting that at least we could all scramble quickly.

But eventually, after more than two years back there, I grew restless and felt I needed to move on. I moved back to New York City and guilt weighed heavily; I hoped my middle brother didn’t consider this an abandonment during what we then knew to be his final phase but there was no way of knowing how long that phase would last. He had been through so much and been close to death before, and he always fought back. He had proved worst case scenarios wrong time and again. I thought, I hoped, he would have wanted me to be where I felt more comfortable. I have to believe that to be true. Even so, it is a cruel joke that we seem to always think there will be more time than there turns out to be.

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His death wasn’t necessarily a surprise but the speed of the final decline was. Late one night after returning from D.C. for a quick work trip and getting the update that it was time to come home, I booked a flight from New York to Dallas for the next day and repacked my suitcase. No one can predict a last breath with firm accuracy, but the hospice nurse recognized the signs of a body starting to shut down telling us it would be days, maybe a week. The day I flew home turned out to be his last. When the car pulled up to our childhood home, I had missed him by 90 minutes.

At my arrival, the stretched rubber band of my emotional distance snapped me back firmly in place. Every carefully maintained mile between me and my past collapsed in a single moment. I felt a longing, a yearning for what once was I haven’t known before.

These past months, I’ve been thinking more about the cost of love. There’s an Albert Camus quote,

“It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.”

Oh, Camus. So pithy, so applicable. I would add to Camus’ premise that we will all despair despite ourselves, love is rewarding (and worthwhile, profound, etc.) and yet is also simultaneously a great cause of despair, not just an alibi for it. If and when someone leaves your life by choice, situation, duty, or death, it is then that despair fills the gap in direct proportion to the love felt or shared. Any of the forms of love can be substituted for romantic love in this quote with the same result.

Among the many words for “love” used by the Ancient Greeks is storge: familial love. That is what activated the snap of my rubber band. My brother was seven years older than I am and so we were at different phases of growing up as children, and then as adults we led very different lives. There were years when he felt impossibly older, he entered his teens when I was only six. He graduated high school before I started junior high. And yet, as I looked at photos from our youth, there are simply little boys with matching blond hair and sunburned noses.

As I turned through the old photo albums putting together the memorial slide show, the fresh ache of remembrance of a shared childhood filled me. The orange tones of an old photograph and ‘80s pajamas on a messy bed, limbs entwined as small brothers slept deeply, a box of my Pampers at the edge of the frame. A special occasion dress up and posing in front of the fireplace, our eldest brother towering over us, three kids — me as the runt with the goofy grin — when life still felt impossibly long.

One of these photos activated the despair and storge equally. I didn’t remember it being taken or ever seeing it before, but it instantly transported me decades and several states away. A quick snapshot from a family summer vacation caused my breath to catch in my chest and tightened my throat. The joy and innocence of two boys sitting on the stairs at the edge of a deck, holding the flowers they picked with the afternoon sun backlighting their towheads angelic. Before self-consciousness and without complication. Seeing this photo was one of the many moments over that trip home that broke me, but in the best possible way. It felt like a physical cracking open of the hard emotional shell developed in response to a difficult and at times cruel world. Hidden underneath that shell was the feeling of being a little boy with a big brother who happened to be blind and loved to laugh.

As the first anniversary gets closer, I think the storge has begun to outweigh the despair. And, as Camus put it, if we are to despair anyway, or to take it further, if the cost of love is despair, is it ever worth it? In my humble opinion, yes. Every damn time. Even without knowing what love is going to ask of us.

And so, at the beginning of March, time keeps moving. Love, and the ache, remain.

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The walk from the subway station to Elliot’s studio took less than five minutes, which meant it was devastatingly long. The heat had reached the kind of intensity that made the pavement seem to generate its own warmth, as if the sun had coaxed the city itself into producing temperature from within and force out the overcrowding bodies, allowing nature to take over. George had sweat through his loose fitting t-shirt, which now clung uncomfortably to him. Other people on the street moved with determined resignation, the practiced expression of those who understood that the city would do what it wanted and that resistance was largely symbolic. He passed one bodega, then another, and then the building appeared, unmarked, its second floor given over to Elliot’s studio.

The stairwell was narrow and dim, a dark passage that contrasted with the bright day that sat outside it. One needed a moment for their eyes to adjust to see where the stairs began. When George reached the studio proper, the relief of central air conditioning arrived immediately and disproportionately, his sweat-soaked clothes turning cold. The studio was fairly large, an open and lofted space with eight padded tables set around three walls, creating stations for tattoo artists. Drawings and examples of flash tattoos created by the artists were pinned carefully in clusters — designs from previous work and the permanent marks they had made on other bodies. George scanned the room: a snake coiled around a wrist, an anchor on a shoulder, bodies covered in patchwork images created from sentiment and emotion. There was care here. Precision. Images to make the bearer remember or simply smile.

There was one other patron, a young woman who entered just before George. One artist — a woman in her 30s with tattoos covering her body that managed to seem curated and carefully chosen rather than overbearing — greeted the patron and began to prep her station. Another artist sat hunched over a large dining table in the center of the room with his back to the door. George stood in the waiting area, unsurely, as the artist continued working without turning around. As Elliot continued final touches on the stencil, George approached softly.

“Elliot?” George asked.

Elliot raised his head and turned to meet George’s eyes, a quiet and welcoming smile on his face. He was mid-to-late twenties, average height and solidly built, with close-cropped hair and a calm, focused presence that seemed earned rather than assumed. His voice was steady but soft-spoken. His movements were efficient. He explained that the stencil was not finished yet, that he wanted to revise a few elements, adjust spacing, correct alignment.

George nodded. “No problem, take your time.” This was not something to rush, so George contentedly returned to the waiting area by the door and sat on a large, black leather sofa. It swallowed George as he leaned back and pressed the wet shirt into his back. George leaned forward to put elbows on knees in a vain attempt to dry it out.

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The room settled around him. The air conditioning worked on him gradually, drying the sweat on his skin in a way that was faintly uncomfortable, as if his body had committed to one condition and resented the correction. Time behaved differently here, the way it did in all rooms designated for waiting. George checked his phone, 12:05pm. The appointment was scheduled for noon. He put the phone away.

His hands clasped loosely together. The skin at the back of his hands and palms was beginning to show the faint wear of age and repetition. Lines accumulating, they no longer held the supple promise of youth.

Wayne’s hands would have been different. Thinner fingers, nails repeatedly picked small from nervousness or anxiety or habit. But they shared a distinct feature: the hair pattern. Men in the family were hirsute in largely the same way, hair growing in the same design, even on the backs of their hands where it clustered at the wrist and along the outside edge. Three boys, three men, three brothers in total, pedigree apparent just by looking at their hands.

The studio, once George allowed himself to register it fully, resembled a hospital or clinic — not entirely visually, but structurally. A waiting area with chairs chosen for endurance and comfort. Old magazines haphazardly thrown on a coffee table. Clean surfaces that encouraged hygiene. A faint smell of something antiseptic. The resemblance was not exact, but the recognition was immediate.

Wayne had tolerated hospitals admirably, and for a long time, courageously. He had not dramatized the experience or resisted it out of principle. He showed up when instructed. He waited when waiting was required. He answered questions clearly. He learned the rhythms of admission and discharge, the negotiations and necessary compliances that came with being a patient rather than a visitor passing briefly through.

An hour waiting in the studio passed George without resistance.

Elliot worked steadily at the back table, revising the stencil with focused attention. No wasted motion. No hurry. After a quick consultation with George and correction of the word hidden in the image, he carried the finished design with care, the abacus rendered cleanly, the spacing precise, the concealed word integrated seamlessly.

They discussed placement. George’s left thigh, just above his knee. Visible when chosen. Hidden otherwise. Elliot examined the leg with professional neutrality, accounting for muscle, curvature, movement. After shaving the area, the stencil pressed against George’s skin with slight stickiness, the carbon marking him temporarily with what would soon be permanent.

George studied his reflection in the mirror. The abacus appeared in blue outline. It was one of the many building blocks of a shared history, wrenched from the past, interior to exterior, it would now be a bridge to carry into the future. As if it was pulled through George’s skin, something previously invisible, it now would appear as if it were always there. It fit.

As George laid on the table while Elliot made final preparations, George felt something unexpected — the anxiety he had carried for weeks dissolving without ceremony. In its place came a quiet acceptance, not calm exactly, but absence of resistance.

For a moment, brief enough that it almost didn’t register, George noticed that nothing was preventing him from leaving.

The thought arrived without urgency, which was what made it unsettling. There was no panic, no spike of fear. Just a simple inventory of facts. His phone and wallet were in his pockets. Elliot had drifted away to get a fresh needle and vials of black ink. The door was not locked. The mark on his body was still carbon and possibility, something that could be undone with soap and water and a few minutes in the bathroom sink.

He could stand up. He could say he wasn’t ready. He could apologize — there were words for this kind of thing, socially acceptable exits that required only mild embarrassment. He could step back into the stairwell, into the heat, into a version of the afternoon that remained unaltered. Nothing about the day would collapse. The world would accept the change without protest.

The realization carried no relief. It was simply there, waiting to see what he would do with it.

George understood then that this was the actual test — not pain, not endurance, not sentiment — but whether he would remain when leaving was still an option. Whether he would accept an absence and try to fill it with a tattoo. The temptation was not escape, exactly, but preservation: the chance to keep his body as it was, unmarked, intact. But leaving now would not bring back his brother. He thought of all the times Wayne had sat in waiting rooms knowing he could walk out, knowing that refusing the next step would not be dramatic but would quietly rearrange the future. He thought of how often Wayne had stayed anyway.

George did not move.

The thought receded, not because it had been argued with, but because it had been acknowledged. It left behind a faint pressure, a sense of narrowing, as if the day had taken note of his decision and adjusted accordingly. When Elliot returned, George was still laying exactly where he had been, the possibility of departure already absorbed into what came next.

“You okay? Ready?” Elliot asked while he sat on a rolling stool next to the table, leaning over and draping his left side to straddle George’s leg, lifting the needle and preparing to strike.

George nodded.

The needle touched skin. The sensation registered as a faint prick, more precise than painful. It dulled almost immediately, the body and mind accepting it as information rather than threat. The handpoke technique moved dot by dot, deliberate, patient. Click, click, click.

George watched the outline form. The boundary slowly grew to encase a sacred memory. He thought of Wayne — not as absence, but as presence. As laughter that distorted the face. As a teenager swaying with his music in his ears. As a young man clicking beads in the backseat of a car while landscapes he couldn’t admire passed.

The pain remained minimal. Manageable. Almost beside the point.

The needle moved. Slowly at first, then with gaining speed. And George sat still, feeling the permanence settle into his skin as if it had been waiting there all along.

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