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 thing. The naming makes it concrete. The concrete thing becomes something you can work toward, which is different from something you can merely wish for.

The cover takes two weeks.

He designs it himself in a free tool, adjusting the font by single points for hours at a stretch. Moving the title up by three pixels. Moving it back down. Looking at it on his phone screen and then on his laptop and then printing it at the library and holding it at arm’s length. He knows it is not a perfect cover. He knows this even as he is making it. He makes it anyway, as

perfectly as he can with the tools he has, which is how everything in his life gets made.

The first copy arrives in a padded envelope on a Thursday morning.

He holds it for a long time before he opens the envelope.

When he opens it he holds the book — his book, his name on the front cover, his words inside it — and he waits for the feeling. He has been waiting for a specific feeling, has been anticipating it for months, a feeling he imagines as large and confirming, a feeling that says: arrived, done, real.

The feeling is not that feeling.

The feeling is smaller and more precise. It sits in his chest in the area just below the sternum and it does not expand outward. It says, quietly, in a voice that sounds like his own but older: there is more to do.

He puts the book on the shelf.

He sits down.

He opens a new document.

He starts the next one.

* * *

Him: The Hardest Journey nearly breaks him.

Not the writing of it — well, the writing of it is hard, but hard in the right way, the way that means you are getting somewhere real. What nearly breaks him is the completion of it. The moment when he types the last line and the thing is done and he has to sit with what he has made, which is a book about loving someone in a way that was real and complete and ultimately insufficient because the love, real as it was, could not fix what was broken in him, and the trying to fix it had its own damage.

He finishes the manuscript on a Sunday night in February. He is twenty-one. He is in the Holyoke apartment, which he has not yet left, which he will leave in eight months. He is at the desk he has had since high school, which wobbles on the left side.

He reads the last line.

He closes the laptop.

He sits in the chair for a long time. Ghost — he has just gotten Ghost, Ghost is six months old and has not yet settled into the enormous presence he will eventually become — comes and sits in his lap, which Ghost has not done before, which Ghost will later do often but does for the first time now. Vincent does not move. He sits in the chair with the cat in his lap and

the closed laptop on the desk and the finished manuscript inside it and the city outside doing whatever the city does on a Sunday night in February.

He sits there for almost an hour.

Then he opens the laptop.

He opens a new document.

He starts the next one.

* * *

An Inconvenient Attachment takes four years.

He writes it in the margins of everything else. In the Portland winter, in the parked car on a street he does not know, in the notes app at 2 AM when the notebook is not within reach. In Springfield, at the desk, at the kitchen table, on the couch with Ghost on one side and the laptop on the other and Omen watching from the bookshelf with his collecting-information expression. He writes it in the specific way you write something that is not one story but the accumulation of many stories that share a theme, that are all circling the same center without being able to name the center until the circling is done.

The center, when he finally names it: attachment as survival strategy. The way people

who have learned that connection is unreliable will still reach for it, every time, because the alternative — not reaching — is its own kind of death.

He names this in the manuscript’s final chapter. He writes it directly. He does not dress it up.

When An Inconvenient Attachment hits Amazon Best Seller — number eleven — he is eating cereal at the kitchen counter in the Springfield apartment. It is 8:30 AM. He is eating the Cheerios he bought at the grocery store on Boston Road during the trigger episode that happened the week before. He has been eating them every morning because the bag is large and he is not good at buying grocery staples in quantities proportional to how quickly he actually uses them.

He looks at the notification.

He finishes the cereal.

He rinses the bowl.

He goes to the desk.

The notebook opens.

He writes for three hours and it is one of the best writing days he has had in months, which he does not entirely understand but has stopped trying to understand, because the relationship

between his emotional state and the quality of the work is not linear and not predictable and after eleven years he has accepted this as a feature, not a bug.

He has been doing this for eleven years.

He will do it for the rest of his life.

He takes up the pen again.

* * *

He goes back and reads Freedom every few years.

He does this not as an act of nostalgia but as a calibration — a check on how far the craft has come, what was already there at nineteen that he did not know how to develop yet, what was missing that he has since found. He reads it the way a doctor reads an early set of X-rays — not to judge the younger body but to understand the trajectory.

Freedom is raw in ways that are both its flaw and its best quality. The language is urgent and unpolished, the metaphors reaching further than the craft can reliably support them, the emotional temperature consistently high because he did not yet know how to create meaning through restraint. He knows this now. He does not know it at nineteen and the not-

knowing is part of what makes Freedom the book it is.

He reads a poem from Freedom and then a poem from the current manuscript and the distance between them is measurable. The current work is quieter. It earns its moments more carefully. It trusts the reader more — trusts them to feel what is happening without being told how to feel it.

He reads both with equal respect. They are both his. They are both evidence.

* * *

The publishing process has never not been difficult.

He signed up for it at nineteen without full knowledge.

He would sign up for it again.

He would sign up for it knowing everything he now knows about the distribution and the notifications and the marketing and the specific loneliness of building something in a room and then releasing it into the world and waiting to see if it lands.

He would sign up because the alternative — not writing, not publishing, keeping the

notebooks in the box and never sharing the translation — is not an alternative he is willing to choose.

The pen moves. He publishes. He waits. He writes some more.

This is the career. This is the practice. This is the whole thing.

The pen comes up.

* * *

He thinks about the notebook as a physical object more than he thinks most writers think about their notebooks.

He has thought about the paper — weight, texture, the way different papers receive different pens, the way a very smooth paper makes his handwriting faster and less considered and a slightly rough paper makes it slower and more deliberate. He uses a paper weight that is slightly heavier than standard, which means the pages do not bleed through, which means he can write on both sides if he chooses, which he does not, but could.

He has thought about the binding — the sewn binding that allows the notebook to lie flat when open, which is essential, because a notebook that does not lie flat requires one hand

to hold it and one to write and the one-handed writing is less fluid. He has tried spiral notebooks, which lie flat but have the wire that catches his wrist. He has tried ring binders, which are for other purposes. He has tried sketchbooks. He has returned, always, to the black composition notebook with the sewn binding.

He has thought about the pen — the specific nib size, the specific ink weight, the way the pen moves across the paper. The Pilot G2 0.7 is the answer he has arrived at after years of trying other answers. He has tried fountain pens, which require maintenance he does not have the patience for. He has tried ballpoints, which are inconsistent in their ink delivery. The G2 0.7 is exactly right. He buys them in packs of twelve.

These are not incidental choices. They are part of the practice, as specific and considered as the prose style or the revision process. The notebook is where the work begins. The notebook is the most important object in his life. He takes it seriously.

He turns to a new page.

He uncaps the pen.

He moves forward.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. The practical meaning is this: time. Publishing costs writing time. He knows this. He has made his peace with it. The peace is imperfect. He will always prefer the page to the process. But the process is part of it. He does it anyway.

He reaches for the pen.

He stays with it.

He stops and reads what he has.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. This is not revision. This is the question before revision: is it honest? Is it saying the true thing? He reads it again. Outside the window the day is changing. The light on the desk is different. He is aware of his body — the shoulders, the neck, the hours in the chair. He stands. Moves. Returns. Ghost has not moved from the couch.

Vincent looks at the desk. At the notebook. At the card. The work outlasts the pain that produced it. He knows this. He always comes back to this. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He lifts the pen.

The page receives it.

He writes. He always writes.