Category: The Human Experience
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Arriving.
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…
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Now and Not Yet
I wonder how many minutes I’ve spent mourning in advance all the things that I’ve yet to experience—how death has left a profound impact on me, how it will again, how trees are rooted but lose to the elements every year at the same time. We see the weeping coming and we prepare our shields…
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On Stillness.
The air was simple and pulsing, so much so that it wasn’t. Not really. It may have just been my mind—prone to seeing commotion in all things, easily identifying chaos at the brim of every step—tricking me into believing air could have a heartbeat. That it could take up a life in showing people what…
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Brazen Hope
“Hold onto hope if you got it / Don’t let it go for nobody / And they say that dreaming is free / But I wouldn’t care what it costs me” …
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Litany of Fractures
One. If the sound of your voice was the only thing that the people you love the most would hear for the rest of their life, what would you want it to sound like? What would you say? What words would persist no matter the wreckage? There are distinct moments when my mind focuses on…
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The house builder
“I love you.” Her words to me—some of her last to anybody before she fell into an alive sleep, then stuttering and side-stepping into passing. She held on until she couldn’t anymore. Even though I wasn’t with her when she left, I will carry these words with me to remind myself that love…
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On Being a Writer.
In an interview with Studs Terkel in December of 1961, James Baldwin is quoted saying “… education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach some people to think; and in order to teach some people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn’t be something…
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This mind
its tactful complexities come to the surface to see how much sunlight it can gather. Taking root, it convinces me that every plane I get on will only touch down in pieces, scattered across plains where nobody exists. It reminds me of how human I am when death takes someone away from their lives and…
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To Charlotte: Part One
The person, not the city. To be read when you’re ready, which I recognize you won’t know until you know. This is part one of the X amount of letters I’ll write you between now and forever. Spreading ashes like memories across a lifetime of lifting heavy things so Charlotte has a well-lit path to…
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A letter to my father
In the span of five months, a friend of mine passed away at 27 and my grandmother passed away at 93. Ever since then I’ve faced this sort of undeniable truth that we all will turn to dust at some point. All living things don’t live forever–some live longer than others, some sooner than most–and…
R. Francis Williford 