Another Us

I hope the multiverse theory is true.

I hope there’s another us

that made it.

The us that was strong enough.

The us that didn’t rip each other apart.

The us that made the right choices.

I hope they’re happy.

I hope they’re laughing in the kitchen.

I hope the dog’s still at their feet.

I hope they still look at each other

like they’re holding the whole world in their hands.

Because here

in this universe

in five months we’ve moved countries apart.

You were my everything.

Now we only talk

to argue about money.

No “good morning.”

No “I miss you.”

Just numbers,

and silence,

and ghosts of what we were.

But somewhere

somewhere they’re still together.

Somewhere they’re still in love.

Somewhere they’re still choosing each other,

every single day.

And maybe

just maybe

that’s enough

to keep me breathing

in this one.

Chapters

Some people get certain chapters. Others only read the parts where they recognize themselves. I’ve started to realize my life is made up of these little segmented stories… conversations, moments, and confessions tucked into different journals for different people. It’s not that I’m hiding anything. It’s just that somewhere along the way I started handing out pieces instead of the whole book.

And maybe that’s just how life works. Maybe it’s natural to have friends who know your past and others who know your present, but very few who know how the two connect. Still, I wonder what it would feel like to hand over all the pages to someone and trust they’ll want to keep reading.

Lately, I’ve been sitting with the spaces between those stories. The gaps where the rest of me lives. They’re not empty. They’re the places I’m growing into. The spaces where I’m learning to choose myself without apologizing for it. And maybe those gaps aren’t waiting to be filled at all. Maybe they’re where the good stuff starts.

Same Sand

You’re from the South,

all heat and honey and stories told slow

and I’m from Indiana,

all flat fields and quiet people

trying not to say too much too loud.

We shouldn’t get each other.

Not really.

Our roads were carved by different hands,

different ghosts,

different reasons to run.

But somehow

here we are.

Both of us

barefoot in the same damn sand,

watching the tide smooth out things we didn’t know we were carrying.

You came here chasing something

a reset, a reason,

maybe just a wave that didn’t feel like the past.

And me?

I came here trying to remember who I was

before everything got so loud inside.

And we meet in the middle,

between sunscreen soaked shifts and seagulls,

talking about life like two old men

who’ve seen too much

but still believe in something easier

Man, it’s wild

how someone so not like you

can think exactly like you.

Can say “you know what I mean?”

and you do,

every damn time,

like your brain and mine

share a beach chair somewhere in the back of our heads.

We laugh at the same dumb shit,

stress over the same work problems,

but underneath all that,

we’ve cracked open pieces of truth

we didn’t think anyone else would recognize.

You, with your Southern past.

Me, with my Midwestern ache.

Both of us found something here

that wasn’t on the brochure

not just sun, not just waves,

but connection

in a world that mostly forgets how to do that.

Being. Here, Now.

Right now, I am here

feet dusty,

heart light,

breath slow like the golden hour.

I’ve met someone who sees

the same honey-glow in the sky,

calls it beautiful

in a language my soul remembers.

The road is long, yes

but today,

I laugh with the wind,

sip stillness like lemonade,

and find connection in unexpected places.

Gratitude hums in my chest

not for answers,

but for the questions that brought me

to this very now.

We’re all heading home,

one curve at a time.

And damn if the view

isn’t worth the drive.

Not Built For This

I told the mirror,

“I’m fine.”

It cracked a little.

I told my family,

“I’m doing well.”

They believed me.

Maybe.

I told the boy,

“You can use me.”

And he did.

And I told myself,

“This is just what it means to be alive.”

But it wasn’t.

It was just what it meant to be

lost.

2014: The Year I Let Everyone Use Me, Including Myself

It wasn’t one guy.

It was all of them.

A parade of maybes and fuckboys and

“I don’t usually do this”

until I stopped remembering what I liked,

what I wanted,

what I needed.

College slipped away quietly.

Assignments ignored,

dreams postponed indefinitely.

I was chasing dopamine in people

who didn’t even save my number.

And I told myself I was choosing this.

But it felt more like falling

than flying.

The only time I felt close to anything was right after it ended.

Naked, buzzing,

empty.

That’s how I knew I’d gone too far

even the booze stopped working.

Even the high felt low.

2014: Online Encounters

in

No names.

No cuddling.

Just skin and forgetting.

He smelled like cologne

and desperation.

I smelled like vodka

and panic.

After, he said,

“You’re so chill.”

And I laughed.

Because I was freezing.

Oscar

in

My whole life fits in a van

and somehow,

I still have room to breathe.

He rumbles like an old man

and holds me like a secret.

This is not retreat.

This is resurrection

on four balding tires.

Do you miss me the way I miss you?

It hits me sometimes

small things. Tiny things.

A word, a smell, a flicker of light.

Suddenly I’m back in a memory so deep I’d almost buried it.

And it hurts

not just because it’s gone,

but because it was real.

Is it nostalgia?

Sentimentality?

Maybe something more like melancholy,

but softer, like a bruise that stopped aching but never actually healed.

I miss it

all of it.

I miss us.

I miss the way we laughed,

the silliness of two people completely, recklessly in love.

But if I’m being honest

I started missing us a year before I ever left.

That ache? It wasn’t sadness.

It was closer to anger.

At what we had become.

It was the quiet heartbreak of knowing what we were losing

and still watching it slip away.

Now, though…

Now I see it all.

The beginning, the middle, the undoing.

And maybe

maybe

one day,

we’ll grow back toward each other in some new way.

But even if we don’t,

we’ll always have those moments.

The real ones.

The joyful ones.

The messy, golden, human ones.

And I’ll miss them.

God, I’ll miss them every day.

Clear

the wind’s loud,

but my mind isn’t.

sun on my face,

sand in my toes,

heart finally not asking for anything.

no panic,

no flashbacks,

just me,

breathing

like it’s not a task.

the waves don’t need me

to be more than I am,

and for once,

I don’t either.

Life Raft

Today is a day

like so many before

I wake up with breath in my chest

and some kind of peace

stitched into my ribcage.

The kind you don’t notice

until it replaces chaos.

I’m grateful.

For the dirt under my nails

from rebuilding myself

again

and again.

For the calm that comes

from doing the next right thing

on days I’d rather vanish.

But grief still knocks.

Not like a storm anymore

more like a soft tap at the side door

while I’m cooking dinner

for one.

I don’t want to go back to who I was.

God, no.

But I’d be lying

if I said I didn’t sometimes wish

I could’ve brought him with me.

Wish I could’ve grown

without burning it all down.

But I didn’t.

I jumped.

No parachute.

No second guess.

Just splinters and sirens and

the slow realization

that I was the wreckage.

And now

I can’t ask to be taken back.

I don’t deserve that.

I don’t expect it.

What I can do

what I am doing

is building a raft.

A boat.

A damn life support system

out of scrap wood and sober days.

Because this version of me

the one with shaking hands and

too many regrets

he deserves to live.

To get old.

To make it.

So I let go of the snapshots.

The what if we’d lasted

and who I thought I’d grow old with.

I tuck them away

somewhere soft

but not sacred.

Because the people I hurt

don’t owe me a thing.

And love doesn’t erase the hurt

it can only honor it.

With space.

With silence.

With acceptance

that arrives

some days

only after a breakdown

and some coffee.

I can’t go back.

I’m not sure I would, even if I could.

But I won’t forget, either.

Because that boy

the one who lost everything

was me.

And that life,

for all its mess,

had love in it.

Real love.

And I’ll carry the good

like a stone in my pocket

heavy, grounding,

and always there

when I need to remember

who I was,

who I lost,

and who I get to become.

Working On It

I don’t want you to think I have it all together.

That I’ve cracked some code.

That I’m thriving in the best way a human possibly can.

I live in a van.

I shower at a gym.

I’m still figuring out how to store food

without it going bad

and cook without setting off the smoke alarm.

My essays might read like I’m enlightened.

Like I’ve found peace, or purpose, or some mystical alignment with the moon.

Like I sit cross legged and breathe in answers.

But that’s not the case.

And that’s not the point.

The point is

I’m working on it.

The point is

I’m trying to find out who the hell I am,

and where I fit in a world that never really made space for me.

For so long, I didn’t have a reason.

Didn’t have a calling.

Didn’t have a damn clue what I was doing except trying to feel less empty.

And now?

Now I’m trying so fucking hard

to figure out my place.

To find out what I’m good for.

To share what I can share.

To give what I can give.

And still have something left

that feels like it’s mine.

I know, I know

Sometimes it might sound like I used to be a terrible person

and now I’m blessed.

Now I’m all healed.

Now I’m good.

But that’s not the story I’m telling.

I’m not some before and after testimonial.

I’m not a clean narrative.

I’m not standing here polished and whole.

I’ve been broken.

Rebuilt.

Broken again.

So many times I’ve lost count.

I’m still trying to figure out which pieces are actually mine

and which ones I stole

just to feel like I belonged.

I’m trying to find out

if the mask I wear is a mask at all

or if maybe, it’s just my face now.

And if it is…

what does that mean?

I’m not sure.

But I am showing up.

Even like this. cracked, unfinished, a little lost.

I’m showing up.

And I’m working

so hard

to figure it out.

…Or

Maybe someday,

we’re in some cozy kitchen,

you stirring a sauce

while I chop too slowly,

and we’re bumping hips

like none of it ever hurt.

You’d laugh

and say,

“Remember when we almost gave up?”

And I would

the silence,

the cold mornings,

the almosts.

But we didn’t.

We kept reaching,

kept burning things on the stove

just to feel warmth.

And maybe love

was never the fireworks.

Maybe it was this

us,

tired,

still trying,

still here.

Happy,

That we chose this.

-or-

Maybe someday,

in some version I made up,

we’re in a small kitchen,

you humming,

me barefoot and pretending

not to watch you cook.

You’d say,

“Wild we almost didn’t make it,”

and I’d smile

because in that life,

we did.

But here,

in this one,

we didn’t.

We let it go.

We walked away.

Still, some nights

Most nights

I sit with the ghost of that moment,

imagining us

choosing to stay.

And maybe that’s its own kind of love

the kind that wonders,

even now.

What if.

Leftover Love

I still save a seat for you
in conversations that never happen.
Still flinch when a song knows too much.
Still wonder if you ever
wake up missing the way we used to be
before the quiet got too loud.

For the Promises, For Myself.

It hasn’t happened yet.

But it’s coming.

I feel it building in the back of my throat

not guilt,

not shame,

but that old familiar heat

that says you know better now,

so do better.

And still…

I stall.

I rehearse what I’ll say in the shower.

Whisper to ghosts in the mirror.

Run simulations like a nervous machine:

They yell.

They cry.

They don’t remember.

They laugh.

They forgive.

They don’t.

I’m afraid of every version,

especially the ones where they just stare

no reaction,

just the heavy silence of a person

who doesn’t owe you a goddamn thing.

That’s the worst, isn’t it?

Not the rage,

but the indifference.

Because I was always so loud in their lives

my chaos dressed in charm,

my pain wearing other people’s skin.

And now…

I’m learning to show up

without the armor of excuses,

without cracking a joke

to dodge the dead air between us.

I know my tricks.

The way I wrap pain in poetry.

The way I turn confession into performance.

The way I say I’m sorry

but make it sound like feel bad for me instead.

Not this time.

God, please

not this time.

This time,

I want my hands open.

I want my voice quiet.

I want to offer, not ask.

I want to speak from the place

that isn’t looking for applause

only air,

only space,

only a little dignity

on the walk to make things right.

The truth?

I don’t know who I’ll be

on the other side of these sorries.

And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe this is the doorway.

And the key is just

saying it

anyway.

Even if they don’t walk through.

Even if they slam the door.

Even if they ask,

Why now?

Because now is when I can.

Because now is all I’ve got.

And I am ready

to feel the weight lift,

one apology at a time

even if it’s just me

standing in the aftermath,

alone,

but finally still.

I Went Anyway

I wasn’t ready to heal.
Still packed grief in my carry-on.
But life doesn’t care.
It just asks,
“Are you coming or not?”

Soft Boy Era

I cried to a stranger in the target parking lot.
Felt poetic, so I didn't hide.
The stranger smiled like they’d been there, too.
Maybe we all romanticize rock bottom
so it feels less like drowning
and more like performance art.

Don't Let Go, Let Go

They said let go like it was nothing.
Like it didn’t come with claw marks and blood.
But I let go anyway.
Because I wanted my hands free
for whatever comes next.