What They Called It
He is having a bad week. He knows how to name a bad week now. Before he had the clinical vocabulary, before the pamphlet in the waiting room, a bad week was just a bad week — undifferentiated, shapeless, something wrong that he could not locate or…
Spectrum News
The camera is smaller than he expects. He is sitting in a chair in a studio space in Worcester on July 28, 2021, and the reporter across from him — Valerie Bell, firm handshake, specific efficiency — is reviewing her notes. He is not nervous. He reminds…
August 29
August 29, Tuesday. He writes the date and sits for a moment before writing anything else. This is not his usual mode — he writes the date and moves directly into the content, the date as header rather than pause. But today he sits with the date.…
Things
The triggers are not always the things you expect. He has made a list, in the notebook, of the ones he knows. Not for publication — for himself, for the practical management of a life that includes navigating spaces that do not know they need to be…
Places
Portland, Maine is the winter he turns twenty- three. He drives up in November with the cats in the carrier, three boxes in the back seat, the duffel bag, and the box of notebooks, which he carries himself up the stairs of the sublet and places in the…
People
The world gets to him the way it gets to everyone who feels things without a volume knob. Slowly at first. Then all at once. He is thinking about this on a Sunday in late July — July 23rd, he writes it in the notebook, top of the page, the date that…
Before the Break
There is a version of him that exists before everything gets harder. He can see it clearly now — the way you can only see the full shape of weather from inside the house, once the storm has passed and the sky is doing something new. He was twenty,…
The Archive
He opens the closet and takes out the box. He does this rarely — not because the box is scared exactly, because it is not sacred exactly, but because opening it costs something. He has forty-three notebooks in that box and each one represents a period of…
Freedom
He published his first book at nineteen and named it Freedom because he did not have it yet. Naming a thing you do not have is one way of beginning to want it correctly. He has found this to be true across multiple categories of his life. You name the…
The First Reading
He does his first reading at twenty. The bookstore is in Northampton — small, independent, the kind of store where the owner knows every book and has an opinion about all of them. He has been in touch with her for three months, since he found her email…