On a cold Saturday in late March, I wake with words sprawling, tottering themselves into a poem off of my lips. I move quickly to write it all down. Hours later, I’ve scribbled on the backs of several old papers: a restaurant napkin, a movie pass, the comic section of the local newspaper, a notebook divider—anything with space for the things I cannot stop from leaving. There is a place where every writer feels a rope tighten when the words come faster than the hand can move. It is made up of half magic, and half images from a life lived, and I am a writer in the same way I am a lover: there are plenty of things that I say I can do without believing I can actually do them. Still, my feet find unsteady ledges in an effort to scale objects meant to be seen, not touched. What comes to me, I feel compelled to remember. I write a slew of poems that night. One about loving and light. One about the dark, what it contains or doesn’t, what it holds up or doesn’t, what it can be for people who will never intimately know how the light guides us across days to a greater tomorrow. Always becoming someone or something, perhaps several someones or somethings and I am here, purposefully and unknown. Still learning how to be okay inside of joy. Still working my way through a puzzle with missing pieces. Shay Alexi questioned, “Do you know what it is to love somebody when all their lights go out?” That line stuck with me in the same way my answer to it does. How did I get into this empty room? How do I know my eyes aren’t just closed tightly to savor the dark? I ask about the switch itself, how electricity can travel so fast, how I do not always know if I belong in this space or if I’ve carved into it as a way of saying, “this is mine now.” I have so many questions, so many unanswered thoughts. Alas, I must rest.

Instead, inception. A match strikes. Then, a dancing flicker. A gleam, a sliver of a familiar breath. Fouling off every pitch just to stay in the game, in the bottom of the 9th, down two with one on second, one second to decide if I’ll swing. Step. Go. As far as the light will take me. May I never forget what it means to hold onto things that I cannot fully grasp. Things I’m destined to let go of. And I will not go to where the darkness lives. But when it shows up on my doorstep, I’ll invite it inside. Make some tea, no sugar. I will sit across from it, fumbling around, move my hands across the ink on my pages, look it in the eyes, set down my armor, and begin with belief. I wait for it to make a sound. Make a move. Make a claim that today is over with and next week isn’t coming. I sit with my poems in front of me, hoping one of them can make sense of things right now. There is a line somewhere in these pages about natural disasters. I have referenced love in this way since I can remember. Earthquakes shifting the order of things: dirt split rigidly down Earth’s center, jagged vulnerable cliffs amidst our favorite flowerbeds. We are ripping away from each other; every bouquet from here until the end of everything will have stems we don’t yet know how to cut. We resolve to reach farther but throw the whole thing out. Hope the next dozen will be easier, brighter; have a better shot at surviving this thing, this holy and oft-questioned thing, this beautiful and bold circling-around-the-ridge thing. I move at a speed I do not know towards the place where split headaches begin. When darkness asks me what is most valuable to me, I tell it, “Right here,” pointing straight to the chest, the heart, “right here.” A quiet grin, a subtle laugh, everything and nothing between us, hushed now and I pull the sheets over my head one last time as I drift off to sleep—

Since I moved to Indiana, life has been small musings between heartbreaks. And this is largely what growing up has been for me. The moving and the wishing people were here that cannot be and the election and the disasters that we become when we are hurt but trying to love people. The war with the self when it comes to deciding what is more important: tending to your own heart or giving that up for the sake of someone else’s.

The desire that only seems to compound with time and people and places. The hard semester of learning but not for learning’s sake, more as a practice of survival. The building of a community of people that feel like a home. Or perhaps the building of a community of a few good people who are home despite the miles between us. The understanding of that, finally. The heartbreak of a friend passing suddenly. And holding my best friend as he cries into the confusion, the keen hurt we were all feeling on that rainy day, and all rainy days thereafter.

The heartbreak of a new year spent among friends just trying to make things feel normal again. The early hours of screaming and yelling and hurting so deeply, everything coming to the surface and boiling over. The realization that this might be the beginning of the end of a relationship built over months of loving each other selfishly. The wishing things were different. The birthday in the snow. The semester spent in busy-ness and not taking the time to feel this current moment over and over again. The hurt of my grandmother passing, and the grief I would quickly carry for months. The resistance to what healing could do because I chose not to go home and see her before she left. How, my mother would tell me, she was holding on to see me one last time. How, I would tell her, I “didn’t have time” and how that was a story I was just telling myself so I did not have to face her not remembering me again. How this kind of small mourning comes with being the favorite; the higher up, the harder of a fall, and mine took the longest. How, if I could go back, I would take the hurt of not being remembered over not being able to say a quiet goodbye.

The summer of breaking—in and up—and the newness of hurting all over again. The loneliness that follows. The bitterness and the arguing. The breaking, the breaking.

The semester of finally feeling like I know what I’m doing and the days of trying to make sense of being alone, what it can serve me, and how I can be okay with the way it sits on my bones, reclined and relaxing into the next day. The feeling of not knowing or understanding myself again and trying to find my way back. The darkness sitting with me like an old friend, changed from their years away spent discovering themselves, too. The thought, “I am here again, what should I make of this?”

The new year spent with friends just trying to make sense of how important a community can be inside of us all. The lack of clarity of how I’m feeling about things. The year of “I suppose” or “I don’t know” or “Maybe” and finding the potential in every possibility, even if it means not making a decision. The January spent with quiet snow, a friend visiting and being broken, a birthday with a surprise cake from the people I spend the most time with. The smile I didn’t know would creep onto my face. How sudden, how fleeting.

The writing. Oh, the writing. How, even when I thought I couldn’t, I found possibilities, explored this current world and the next, thought about the ways a body can move to accommodate new weight. The words stacking on top of each other until I can figure out what to do with all of them. How to sort them. The familiar ache of missing a father who’s face I can barely remember. The breaking again.

The year of feeling bad for carrying so many emotions, often several that conflict. How I’ve been taught as a man to not feel them fully (perhaps at all?) and to just keep going. Keep moving, don’t stop to take your own temperature, you will be fine, suck it up, Robbie, be a man. How that’s never been me. Even if I’ve been silent through this life, my inner world is full of hurting and healing and trying to make sense of everything spinning and sprawling.

The January and February and every month until August spent loving and prepping for letting go again. How distance between me and all the people I love the most will always feel like a series of misunderstandings in my heart. How the miles will never make sense. How the missed phone calls and wishing things were different would dwell on my chest, mounting, piling. But how the vivid rememberings of love and friendship and adventures will stick to my insides for forever. How I am understanding love not simply as an act that one “gets” to participate in, but as a window of continuous light shedding its skin until it no longer curls into a question mark; a privilege I am not always realizing I have in this life until I finally do. Until I finally let it go. Perhaps especially now as I feel very much on the eve of something I cannot see, cannot reach into the dusk to feel, cannot fully remember, and tomorrow will be another day of this, won’t it?

Then leaving.

Then the teaching and the meeting and the learning to love the people I spend the most time with and the people that I’ve loved and then left/they left me/there was always going to be leaving, you know? There was always going to be hurting. I was always going to carry it. I was always going to hope to create a space for others that embraces that which they’ve been running from.

Here I am. Skin and bones, flesh and a heart full of remembering, of forgetting. Sitting here today to see if breaking over and over again can mean there will be something new tomorrow. Hope—a muscle I have not learned to work well—sits at my table now and I am in awe. How, despite a darkness that I’ve known and will never know, hope has a role. How I won’t always get it right and I won’t always make sense and I will always have more questions, even when I have answers, and how I am becoming again. Me again. The world spinning again. And how, when I spend every day in exhaust from learning to love the people around me better, I can turn to myself at the end and whisper “me, too.” and everything might make sense, finally.

“What is home but a book we write, then
read again & again, each time dog-earing 

different pages. In the morning I wake
in time to pencil the sun high. How
fragile it is, the world—”

-Maggie Smith, Poet

---

When you meet several loves of your life, you don’t always know it. You don’t always see it as it’s happening in realtime. I’m talking friendship expanding and contracting with the breath, over and over again, in every moment you never expected, showing up in spaces you’d never dream to be. It’s the man who has been through it all with you. The woman who wouldn’t take ‘no, thanks’ as an answer when she asked you to change the world with her. The person who, with a smile a wide as the light, offered to show up for you despite going through his own toughest heartbreak. It’s a boundless sense of becoming, of belonging, of playing the right song at the right time, no words following.

You don’t have the be in love with someone for them to be the love of your life. Have plenty, there’s more than enough to go around. More than enough of you to be seen and heard. I remember when, amidst a heartbreak of my own, I could count on a friend hundreds of miles away buying a plane ticket and flying to me—putting his life on hold so I could feel the comfort of his presence, a familiar and beautiful kind of withness. When my life felt off track and I felt so much uncertainty about moving to a new state alone for the first time, a friend reached out, told me that she loved me “yesterday, today, forever,” gave me the space and time to digest what a love lasting a hundred years could feel like, like hope on top of the breath and beautiful things growing in my heart. When I was wrestling with what to do with all these voids inside of me following the hardest string of days enveloped in darkness of my life, I remember a friend offering his presence. He slept on my couch so that I wasn’t alone that night. I remember how, despite all the bruising brimming past my rough edges, there existed within me a small beam of light to hold onto. Something only a true friendship could create in all the spaces you’d long overlooked and forgotten.

It’s these friends that keep me coming home. That keep me pushing forward, finding my way out of an unlit room. The holders of the light, of presence, of sincerity, of understanding. The friends that see how tired a life can be and still take a few more conscious breaths so that there are extras in case I lose my own.

Perhaps the greatest thing one can give to another is unwavering love. I agree—to be loved is truly a gift. But perhaps the greatest gift of all is to be known and understood by someone. To be given the space to come into yourself day after day without a question, only wild and unconditional support. This is what it means to be a friend.

Their knowing of me lived through everyday moments, helping me to see that we can become undone by each other so long as we know the other is present, listening, willing to sift through rubble to find what’s left. Not knowing what to say but not needing to know right now or next week or three months from now. They created a space that allowed me to take in a world where we all exist at the same time on own own terms. They’ve been knowing that this is what I need most and they allow me to write my own story, no matter how broken.

Friendship. How beautiful it can be to meet people who suffer through your darkest moments just to show you that you are worthy, that you are not the sum of every day you’ve made yourself believe that you are your weakest memories. These beauties—each one, a love song spoken in different languages—committing to knowing you, past and future and present, in every moment, every step. The ones who will be there when the emotion is too big to fit inside all of your creaky folds, your fields of uncharted adventures, your musical magical wonderful heart. Those who will help you with the climb from five hundred or three thousand miles away. Who will write you love letter after love letter explaining how you show up for them, how your belief in them changes their world every day, and how you simply existing has been their saving grace. Who will show up and sit with you when you question every good thing that you put into the world, wondering if people are actually listening, seeing, learning from you. Old friends and new who meet, exchange stories of you, helping one another understand who you are. What you’ve been. Who you want to be. 

I’d always imagined my life coming together like every best friend living on the same street and dinner rotating once a week in each other’s company, talking about big and bright and scary things, singing about how we’re going to heal the world. Now, with every best friend and every person I love deepest and most vibrantly living hundreds of mile markers away, time zones splitting us, I long for this dream. The cities we’re living in are enveloping us and I’m just in my slice of the world hoping that someone will see me and understand, without explanation, just how loved I’m hoping to be. Just how worthy I want to be of belonging but finding it hard sometimes to believe in something so peaceful for my own life. I know how unrealistic it is for me to want to see my best friends getting their mail, bringing groceries in during a thunderstorm, their kids growing up and having soccer practice and going on dates. I know how unfathomable it is to think this can happen right now, how we can hold each other up to the light when each is feeling lowest, through the highlight reels and every editing session. Still, I dream of it.

It’s beautiful to think about how hopeful and messy we are at the ends of each other, breathing life into every broken wing or rib, bruised ego and heart. How every porch light we pass on the way home is nothing but a reminder that everyone is holding out for someone to return. How I want to return, too, to someone or something bigger than myself every night. To believe the good in every person I meet, no matter how adorned, how balding, how worn. Easily-fractured, but always putting ourselves back together with the help of someone surrounding us. A whole slew of someones. An army of encouragers and bravers and the hopeful. A flock of people singing our praises. Old friends and new, some in-between. Becoming family amongst family. We sit down to eat, love overflowing. I am broken but hopeful. Breaking but full of hope.

“How fragile it is, the world—” Maggie wrote, lifting into our collective minds the thought that this fleeting world turns and turns, spinning webs of safe landings for every time we think we’ll crash. How we’ll get to do that for one another when we least expect it. How fragile that it. We are. I am. How, together, we can become infinite across beings. How we’re elevated by that. Together.

 

You ever had a perfect day?

A laugh-filled, legs-hurting, heart-expanding day full of walks and talks and sights kind of day. Memories in the making, best friend to your right, sky blue with clouds pillow fighting as they pass through one another. A sun tan in-the-making, the trees scattering across the horizon, the water slapping against rock, calm in places, returning again. A family on bikes passing on the left, concert soundcheck in the distance, people aching for shade, a bit of a reprieve from the 85 degree weather. No agenda. Just sky.

If someone were to ask me what makes the perfect day, I’d describe this one. How we ate Creole food and adventured in the city. Carried our laptops in satchels searching for coffeeshops we could write at. Talking about the love we give, who gives it back, how important those people in our life are and how we’ll need them tomorrow. Skin glistening with sweat, but not a care in the world. Today? It’s for best friends.

We found ice cream that was made in front of our own eyes. A blend of raspberry and strawberry and custard, sweet and full of whatever it was that we needed exactly in that moment. Adventured to a bookstore and found a few gems amidst its stacks. Stories already consumed, waiting to be discovered again, hoping for a new home. Picked three to come home with me, helping me build this life three or four pages at a time. Jokingly talked about getting tattoos. Gave it some minutes to scramble through our mind. “So let’s get tattoos.” Just like that, we’re getting home stitched into our skin—places that have undoubtedly shook us to our core, flipped us upside down and stole all our lunch money, hung us out to dry. Places that brought us joy, gave us peace, inspired hope with every stubborn step.

It wouldn’t be home without the parts that didn’t quite add up. Without the bruises we accumulated trying to be loved again and again by people who didn’t have the capacity to, couldn’t see us well. Wouldn’t be home without the mile markers we follow into it, the lights we count as night falls, the people that stayed, reminding us how we got here and where we’re going, to never forget where we’re from, to savor the moment before it passes. To let it go when it does finally does.

Michigan. Land of the Great Lakes. Home of the automobile. It’s where my mother was born and raised by her mother, the only place either of them ever settled long enough to take root. The place where I met my first girlfriend and my second (and third), where love was a lost and found bin I rummaged through at least once a year, hoping to find something worth keeping, coming up empty. The borders that I traveled—up north, Kalkaska, Traverse City, Petoskey, Mackinac Island—and the people I traveled with, all tracing lines of friendship and deep life talks. The cities I’d find pieces of myself in—Flint, Detroit, Bay City, Saginaw, Rochester, Brighton, Frankenmuth—and the forgiving and open sky beckoning me back time and time again.

It’s where I learned what family means to me. How I had to leave imaginary lines to know just how much of who I am is wrapped up in the street signs, porch swings, corner stores, and high school hallways. How, every week, rain or shine or snow, I’d clean the garage and mow the lawn. It’s where I first got detention, first learned how to throw a spiral football, had my first double on the baseball diamond and made my first fielding error, and where I ran my first session of hills.

It’s where I first was given an opportunity to advocate for someone who’s voice isn’t often heard and where I learned what good mentorship looks like. It’s where I learned to write, where the first person outside of family told me “I believe in you” and meant it. The place where I first had faith that the sky could actually open up and a god could take my hand. The place where I first doubted that, too. Where I wrestled with belief in general and participated in my first spelling bee. Where I wrote my first of many letters to an ex-lover, marched to her doorstep in the snow, asked her mom if she was busy, hand delivered it to her, and made the trek back home with periodic glances back, hoping to see her coming after me to tell me she wanted to be with me. She didn’t. The place where I stopped believing in real love. The place I decided to love again and where I believed I was worthy of it. So many firsts. Probably some lasts, too.

I come back time and time again, get off the interstate, and am flooded with memories. Remembering how I’d spent years wishing to make it out so I could see the great big world. Now, wishing I’d spent more time at home with my grandmother, my mother, my sister and brother, my niece and nephew, my dad. Wishing I could have one more conversation in my childhood home. One more walk to the bus stop. One more mow of the lawn, one more tree climb, one more race from the bottom of the house to the top, turning off all the lights on my way, just quick enough to not be caught in a shadow. One more conversation with my Yia Yia to tell her that I love her, that I’m proud to call her my grandmother, that she is one of my heroes. One more time wrestling with my brother, who is graduating from high school soon and growing up. One more time. One last time.

If I could go back, I wouldn’t change the small parts. Like how, as a young boy, shy and curious, I made an insect graveyard in my back yard. I can still picture the small mound of dirt, moss covering its top, signaling the resting place of once-alive fliers and crawlers. How accomplished I felt in being gentle with some small dead thing, but how one day long after its creation, I mindlessly mowed over its contents, only remembering after I’d finished the whole yard. How, odd as it is, this would become a metaphor for the way we like to honor our dead, how Buddy Wakefield’s line looms over me every time I come across it: “Cemeteries are just Earth’s way of not letting go. Let go.” How that taught me about death well before death ever came. How it still does.

There are whole days when I miss the way the Michigan air enveloped me. Mixing quiet and loud never felt so comforting to me on the days when I didn’t feel like myself. Trips to the bread store with mom to use our food stamps before they were gone, driving down roads in Redford saying “Yia Yia, where are you?” Even when she knew exactly where Yia Yia was: sitting, waiting for us to reach her, open arms and heart in the direction we came from every summer. How I can remember the painting of ships at a distance against the horizon—water reflecting back, every wave a mirror—hanging in the house she had built for her family. How the painting now hangs in my apartment in Indiana. How I pass it every day, sneaking a glance when I can, remembering what I can remember, digging deep to see her show up long after she is gone. All things disappear if you think hard enough about them. Their edges fading, center soon to go, and so, too, our bodies.

Home.

It’s where the soul expands, bursts, and rebuilds itself with the rubble. That’s what Michigan means to me. Long after I’ve gone away, I will return. Though the air will feel differently, the people will change, the monuments will transform, and the whole state will feel foreign, there will be familiarity that settles into my bones. I will see things new and old and be reminded of the reason why this place means so much to me. It’s forever home. A part of my forever story. No matter how far away I go, the open sky will beckon me again, turning its porch light on one last time to see me drive the distance all the way home.

 

I always tell people that the week after school ends each spring is the saddest week. It feels much like mourning the loss of someone, only they aren’t gone forever. Just for now. This year is no different. I’m learning how to say goodbye in what feels like several languages I haven’t fully learned.

Looking back, I wish I could have known when the people I care about most were going to change me. I wish I could have witnessed it from their eyes. How, with each day of struggle and wonder, we grew together.

It’s true what they say about endings: they never get easier. We get older and sometimes wiser, which means that we begin to learn how important people are to us, how their presence changes us, gives us life, saves us. I wish I could have known every single time I failed them. How I told them I’d be there and wasn’t. How I took frustrations out on them at times or how I couldn’t create a space for them to be themselves sometimes. Now that they’re gone, I’m wondering about all the times I shortchanged them or gave them words I thought they needed but they didn’t ask for. I’m also wondering how lucky I am to be able to work with such bright people who allow me to make mistakes, to fail sometimes, and how they still hold me with positive regard despite the bad days.

This is for you.

For every student staff member I worked with this year, every student I met with, had lunch with, shared stories with, sat with through bad days, wondered about the future with, or got coffee with. This is for you, friends.

This is for every 5:45AM staff meeting that you stayed up all night for. For every one-on-one that went well over an hour (and sometimes two). For every story you shared with me about your lives: about heartbreak and love, family and relationships, the things you’re passionate about, the people who make you feel the most alive, and the hard things you’ve gone through. For every time you listened to me go on and on about something and held that space for me.

This is for all the times you struggled to see the light in yourself. How, at times, you would stumble through the days with heavy things in your heart, not knowing how to ask for help. How, despite the heaviness, you still showed up. Stayed up. Gave love to one another endlessly. I am still learning how to marvel at how beautiful you are. How beautiful we all have the potential to be. How to soften despite every moment the world gave us every reason to harden.

Nine short months ago, we moved in for training, each of you wide-eyed and full of nerves, but excited for what this journey could be about. I told you that I was invested in you, that I was going to show up for you and see you through this year with hopes of challenging you in ways you hadn’t been before. I didn’t know then what I know now. How brave-hearted you all would become. How much you’d let me guide you down dim-light paths, trusting that I wouldn’t steer you to danger.  How genuinely funny and clever you all are, and how witty. How you let me be there with you, for you, by your side when things got really hard, and when you felt like you climbed a mountain. There was no way I would’ve known how much you were going to change me. But here I am tracing all the ways all the days I got to spend with you made me feel lighter and full of a purposeful life.

What a year.

My hope is that you’ll find the time to be where your feet are. To put your phones down and talk to people genuinely. To commit to the journey of growth you’re in the middle of. To recognize when you’re wrong or have made mistakes and to allow yourself the luxury of changing your mind. To create things you’re proud of but not before creating things that you think are imperfect. To say sorry first, even if you’re sure you won’t get one back. To say “I love you” first because you mean it and because life is too short not to tell the people in your life how loved they are.

My hope is that you will remember each other. This team. These people. This community that brought us together, gave us a reason to push past the rough parts, and allowed us to be with one another for a brief but spectacular moment in time. I hope you look back on our time together with a grateful heart and a smile.

Thank you for all that you’ve done to give others a chance to experience joy. I’m with you every step of the way. I’ll miss you every day, and I’ll love you tomorrow more than I did yesterday.

Now go be great.

Until next time,
-RFW

I’ll admit it: the moment the needled etched the first line into my skin, I panicked. Before I could yank my arm back in protest, three more lines scratched across my skin, each slightly longer than the last. When the man carving into me took a small break, I marveled at my own changing. Ink-dipped and buzzing, the needle traced a longer line, another, another, another. Longer now, then shorter, then longer again, and finally shorter with one last stroke. A realtime transformation. How my skin, reddened and swollen,  buzzed with excitement and wonder, pained with a new hope of something to carry.

I don’t remember saying much in the 15 total minutes I spent in the shop that afternoon. It was a rainy Tuesday and my nerves had been steadily agitated. With each passing hour, I thought about this secret I was holding. I’d only told one other person—a friend whom I trusted with something so close to my heart. It reminded me of how a body can keep hidden things hidden. Small realities shared with a select few, so far away from everyone else, manifesting itself in the actions we take with one another. A memory lived over and over again with habitual repetition.

It was my grandmother’s birthday. October 24th. She would have been 94. I can’t imagine living that long I’d say to myself, trying to make meaning out of a life lived well into the decades of heartbreak and adversity, never driving a car or smoking a cigarette. A death that came so slowly and all at once.

My grandmother walked everywhere. The grocery store, bags hanging off of her arms all the way home; the park, watching us playing on the jungle gym for hours; down the street and back again. My grandmother. My Yia Yia.

There were moments when the walking would get her into trouble. When I was 8 or 9, I remember a sewer cap bulging six inches above the sidewalk being enough for her to just barely catch her foot on, her body falling, and her face finally smashing into the concrete, blood rushing down her face. She still managed to stand and walk home, washing off her scrapes. I can remember feeling so disturbed to see someone I loved so much hold in the hurt so that my sister and I weren’t more alarmed. She always found a way home.

It wasn’t until she was much older that she would fall and couldn’t get back up. She was a stubborn woman. It always seemed like there were unchartered waters in her eyes and she insisted that she had to travel them alone. Wouldn’t let anyone help her if she could help herself. I imagine this is one of the biggest parts of her that shows up in me. How I bottle things neatly and put them on a shelf for safekeeping, harboring energy not always meant for me. How I dig my heels in someone insists on helping me, especially when I don’t believe I need it.

My Yia Yia was a fierce defender of everything she loved. It didn’t matter that someone was bigger or stronger or quicker than her—if you came for someone she loved, she always found a way to stand between you and danger. Even when the trouble kept coming and she knew it was going to hurt, she’d rather feel that than you feel it. That’s how you knew she loved you. She didn’t always have to tell you. Somehow, you just knew. I got this from her, too.

Part of who I am today is predicated on the way she loved me so fiercely. I hear grandmothers aren’t supposed to have favorites, but if she did, I was definitely it. I can remember times when it was evident that my sister and brother were treated differently by her than I was. It was sort of an unspoken thing in my family. Something I didn’t fully recognize until I left home for college. I’d come home for visits—Thanksgiving, Christmas, a random weekend in May—and each time I was about to head back to school, tears would stream down her face. “Leaving so soon? When are you coming back? Don’t worry about me, I’ll be alright.”

I admit that there were times when I felt a slight pull by this. “Why does she cry every time I leave?” I’d ask my mom.

“It’s what love looks like, son. One day, you’ll understand.”

I can’t remember the last time I left her for the last time. I can’t remember what she said to me that last time. I can’t remember the date or what time it was or the last time I held her hand. I know that she cried but I can’t remember if I cried too. I can’t remember the things I can’t remember. Her laugh so quiet that right in the middle of it, you’d swear she was at a full stop, time suspended. Her look of concern, of questioning, and of wonder. Her hugs. How, over time, each of her mannerisms withered away, existing in my memory so vividly. These are the things I hope I hold onto for a long time.

I did not know what I had in her until she was gone. Someone who lived love into existence, who remained tender when you were hurting, who didn’t have to say the right thing because she was doing it instead. Someone who knew that the best parts of life are lived when you are loved well by those you look up to. When they believe in you so deeply that, even if you don’t understand it fully, you know it to be true. That’s the grandmother she was. That’s the Yia Yia I knew.

Much of what I aim to do well in this life is show up for people, to love them better every day, and to give them a reason to believe in something. Just like Yia Yia did. The weeks leading up to her passing, I didn’t show up. I didn’t give myself the space to realize that her last days were her last. I was afraid of what I would see if I went home. So I enveloped myself in my office, burying my nose in paperwork and spreadsheets and email after email until time stopped. Mom called. “She’s gone.”

Silence.

Gone.

All of my shortcomings came alive that day. All of the things I wanted to say to her but couldn’t. All the moments I had a chance to show up and be with her but didn’t. All of the times I wished I would have spent more time with her, drinking a cup of coffee or watching a TV show or talking about my mother’s health. We never know that the last time we spend with someone is going to be the last time.

I’ve lived with a heart broken in pieces for a year. But with each day, I grow closer to a truth I was never certain I’d reach: how love, understanding, and unabashed gratitude can be tools to build a life. Each day is another opportunity to be leveled by all that wrecks me, and to lean into that means stretching every truth I’ve ever known so that I can see how many times I can fit inside of it. How I can know it deeply and be changed by it. How I can finally let it go.

When the man etched the last line into my skin and wiped it down, I sat silent. “It’s beautiful” my friend said. Beautiful, I thought. How, even though I’d spent months in what seemed like endless darkness, I could finally carry the weight of her words with me. How it felt like light entering all the fractured parts of my heart, love swimming through, cutting the cold with a tenderness I hadn’t yet known. How I started recognizing the horizon of better days ahead. Days of forgiveness and hope, of light and love, of feeling like I could enter every room brimming with good news. Days of finding my way out, of stretching again, shaking loose my knotted muscles, finding hope in these bones again. It’s my forever story.

Every single day, I am reminded of the words she said to me and what they mean. How love, despite darkness, can free people from keyless rooms. How we can give people the time and space to be their full selves. How we can show up for those who matter the most to us despite rain clouds. How so many brighter days have yet to happen; thousands of suns will break the horizon, looming large above us, making us believe in better things despite all that sets out to break us. I can’t think of anything more beautiful.

 

When I was a boy, I would take 45 minute showers. Something about the hot water hitting me that made me savor that kind of warmth as if it were the last time. I would spend 35 of those minutes covering my ears and slowly walking through the water—back and forth and back again—simulating a brief rainstorm hitting a shaky roof. In this story, my head is the roof. My brain, the interior with which I took up the most space. I suppose that hasn’t changed all these years.

I would close my eyes tight and fold my ears into themselves, leaving little room for either sense to live freely in the world. Standing at one end of the bathtub, I would slowly walk to the other side. The water falling would gradually climb up my lanky frame, the sound of the steady stream getting louder with each inch of movement. Eventually the water would pile on top of itself, pooling for small moments on my head, water unrelenting, and I would stand drowning the senses, hoping to feel it intensely all at once and and not at all.

15 years later, not much has changed. I don’t take 45 minute showers anymore. But the feeling part? That’s where I live a little.

The Robbie everyone knew all those years ago carried so much hope in his heart and so much despair in his lanky frame. He would have never known what was coming next in his life; all the hurt and all the growing into a body that he never understood would eventually feel less like a burden and more like a gift, no matter how awkward. Life brings bigger things: high school and love and loss and scars and love again and loss again and college and the greatest of friends, some not so great, too, and writing writing writing writingwritingwriting and brief moments of peace nestled between an anxiousness that would become a fluid state of the way life is lived and so many books and more love and loss and death and an ever-present sense of urgency and grief and, among many more things, a self-love that always feels like building. Always construction. Never finished and never intending to be. Building that always feels like arriving, every single day, to a structure that creates a space where love grows.

I still learn from that Robbie. He walks with me along the water, remembering the way he used to be. How afraid he was, a young boy, to let his words peel off the of the walls he built and let someone see him. He doesn’t say much in these moments. He’s where I learned how to leave no stone unturned in learning; how some of those rocks have lived inside of him for years without having ever been given a shot at being something more than just something to skip—not a mantle, not a road, not a decoration or trophy. He was where 27-year-old Robbie learned solitude as a way of breathing again, mask off, shield down, sword holstered.

Walking ahead of him now, I look back and see his eyes flicker, hands in pockets, chest pounding, and I think for a brief moment about the distance between us now. How grateful I am to have known him as he fades into my memory, slipping out of sight, and this is what peace is where the water falls.

---

There’s no real way we can know exactly what we’ll be doing in this brief and wonderful life, not a year from now, not a month from now. Our life twists every day—we are on the cusp of something bigger than ourselves. Whether you believe there is a higher being or a series of higher beings or nothing at all, there will always be an increasing urgency within us to love better, ourselves included, and to find hope whenever we can. Wherever we can.