Thursday afternoon. The day began under blue skies, but a cloak, cool and gray, fell over the world around the lunch hour. Energy for the work week has become the last mile of a marathon –– arms no longer open to the wind, eyes fixed on the finish line, soon we will be there.

‘Hello,’ a student greets me, grinning at my office door. I’m focused on an email (always, always focused on an email), so I promise her I’m just about ready. I type a response, reading it aloud to ensure I’ve got the wording right. I set my monitor to rest, turn to her and raise my eyebrows. ‘Coffee?’

We venture to a spot nearby, place our orders at the counter –– soy latte for me, black coffee for her. By some stroke of fortune, we snag a table by the window, conversation framed like a portrait for the abundance of passersby. We dive in, and all the familiar elements emerge first: things are busy but moving, there’s a lot to get done, where’d the semester go and thank god for winter break. Suddenly, just beneath something she says, I sense pain. My mind presses me to gloss over it, move the conversation forward, but my heart digs in. So I ask her if she’s being gentle with herself. Her eyes water. The conversation swells profoundly, vibrantly human.

Continue reading “sunday post: on breaking.” →

I’m beginning to suspect I’m not the hero in this story. Not always, anyway. Maybe not even most days.

I’ve got the best of intentions, of course. I gathered them with great care, actually –– ran my palms over the world as I ran through it, mined lessons from the wounds in my sternum. Brave, I etched into my forearm, reminding me that, if I can be brave, even when it’s daunting, I may not have so many nights sharing an empty hotel room with regret. Love, I scribbled onto every page, into the margins’ margins, embarking on a mission to wander the world and leave love letters in my wake. Gentle. Kind. Sincere. Authentic. Warm. Inspire good things. Leave people braver/kinder/gentler/mightier than I find them. Live and share a worthy story.

Continue reading “sunday post: reliable narrator.” →

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade opens with a chase sequence. In particular, the sequence stars a teenaged Indiana, already jumping train cars and braving danger in pursuit of keeping museum relics out of the hands of the greedy. The sequence results in failure, however; Indiana’s father forces him to return the artifact, and young Indiana bows his face, in dismay, to the floor. When he lifts his face, the scene has changed, and he is now Harrison Ford. All at once, the boy is a man, and he now has the power to right this wrong.

At the age of seven, while waiting to be let out of the school bus, I studied my sneakers and tried to bring this magic unto myself. Blink, I practiced, and you’ll glance up and won’t be a kid anymore. I tried and tried, but it was to no avail.

Continue reading “sunday post: time travel.” →

The wheels of my plane hit concrete at 11:43 PM, jarring the plane enough to wake the toddler two rows ahead of me. He began to cry, his mother hushing him and looking around nervously at other passengers. She met my glance, and I flashed a gentle smile. She returned to her baby. I returned to my phone. You may now use your mobile devices, our flight attendant said airily, my thumb rolling through Twitter in the hopes of perusing without hearing about Trump. You may disable Airplane mode. I’d disabled it on the decline, messages leaping from the sky and into my palms. I smiled. Tiny rebellions.

I spent the previous weekend in New Orleans with my father and brothers. The King men. We set out to have a weekend we’d remember forever, and, I thought foggily on an Uber ride back to my apartment in the City, I think we succeeded. Slushies in foam cups, patio conversations about life and politics and how freaking lucky we are to know each other. Tears, laughs, hugs, because now we had time to say what we’d been carrying for each other. Groggy walks in the morning contrasting bombastic nighttime wandering.

Continue reading “sunday post: slow down.” →

I was 25 years old when I fell apart for the first time. Until that moment, I thought, my life held up to pretty close scrutiny: I set goals and reached them, I was smiling in all the pictures, I’d closely managed my brushes with heartbreak. In short, I’d ‘kept my shit together,’ a 25-year tightrope walk, each step careful and anxious, but poised and pleasant to the outside eye.

Continue reading “sunday post: on mess and magic.” →

Three weddings, and they’ve all begun the same way: I meander into a coffee shop, order an iced coffee with soy, settle into a table next to a window. There I sit, pull my journal open to an empty page, uncap my pen. Inhale, exhale, my fingers tentative. What is it, the blank page whispers, you want to say to them about love?

Continue reading “sunday post: what i know about love.” →

Brazil, Indiana. Situated along I-70 between Terre Haute and Indianapolis. Around 8,000 citizens, most of whom are pretty white and pretty straight. A robust marching band program at the high school, small town football Friday nights, parades through the city dotting the calendar year. Churches on hilltops with gravel driveways, cemeteries where teenagers drive and turn the headlights off in search of ‘ghost lights.’ A Walmart, not Super but sufficient, and a 24-hour truck stop restaurant just off the interstate. Tractors periodically parked in the high school parking lot, cars whizzing by fields of corn and soybeans en route home.

We weren’t raised to proclaim our hometown with pride. As teenagers, we spent most of our time rolling our eyes and charting escape routes. Some of us lifted into the wind, and others abandoned those plans and put down roots. The best of us know that none of us was wrong.

Continue reading “sunday post: hometowns.” →

‘How are you?’ my friend asked me, cutting me off mid-sentence. Her eyes were open, unblinking, and fixed on mine. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘how are you?’

It was November of 2016, and she and I’d arrived to the restaurant maybe five minutes before. Amidst the bustle of a conference, we’d met in the hotel lobby, setting aside time and space to catch up with one another. When she arrived to the lobby, she found me sitting nearby on a couch, steeped in conversation with the man who’d handed back my heart, in pieces, a few months earlier. I wrapped up the conversation, hugged him goodbye, and walked with her to the restaurant in near-silence. Sitting across from me, in that moment, she wasn’t interested in hearing how ‘fine’ I was.

Continue reading “sunday post: grief and growth.” →

A funny thing happens when somebody asks me to talk about my friends: I start trying to capture them quickly, sketch an outline of who they are to me, find a quick anecdote, and soon I’m overflowing. A second story, stitched into my sternum with golden thread, rolls across the table. Before I know it, I’ve been talking for a few minutes, my eyes a little wet. ‘You must love your friends,’ says the person across from me, and I shrug and nod.

Yes. Yes, I do.

Continue reading “sunday post: my friends.” →

what does it mean to ‘miss’ people?

The wheels of my plane touched down against Indianapolis pavement just after midnight on Friday morning. No matter how many times I fly, that moment of impact is jarring. The sudden reappearance of the ground, the plane gliding closer and closer to contact, wheels reuniting with earth, and then the roar of the wind overhead as the plane lurches to a halt. More often than not, I discover I’ve been holding my breath.

The airport was sleepy, operating at an eerie lull, and I arrived at baggage claim just in time to grab my luggage without a wait. Rolling it behind me, I stepped through automatic doors and out into an Indiana night. Familiarity fell over me the way a lover surprises you while you’re working, gentle kiss on the crown.

Continue reading “sunday post: missing.” →