Crying in Beautiful Places

For a long time, nothing I wrote could be read. Not even by me.

I was writing every day by hand—a couple of pages most mornings—and most of it was too dark, too raw, too frightening to look at. Some days I wouldn't let myself reread a single word. And still, I kept going. It was the first time in my life I had written this consistently, even though I had no idea what I was writing toward.

My pen started running out of ink. I noticed because the words began to fade as I wrote them. I kept going anyway, pressing harder and harder into the page until there were pages where you could barely see anything at all—just the grooves left behind, the impression of words more than the words themselves. Almost every time though, somehow, the ink came back.

When my dog Rad passed, something inside me shattered. Not just grief—identity, purpose, certainty, the version of myself who knew how to move through the world. My body broke too. I couldn't walk for months. Then I got Mello, and for a brief moment I thought I was healing. But when my life collapsed in California and I had to leave him behind and move back to Maryland—back to my parents' basement at 40 years old, six figures in debt—I spent months wishing I was dead.

I didn't land somewhere poetic or redemptive. I landed in a basement, broken in every way I knew how to be broken, volunteering at a county animal shelter ten minutes away where loss was constant and love still showed up anyway.