The Red Dictionary

Before there was a pen name. Before there were books with my name on the cover. Before there was a website, a vision, a platform, a purpose. There was a boy locked in a room.

Fifteen years old. East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. A raised ranch house on Ainsley Drive that looked like every other house on the street from the outside.

Inside was a different world.

My father’s anger had its own weather system. You learned to read it the way you learn to read the sky before a storm — the particular silence, the footsteps, the energy in the air that told you what was coming. And when it came, it came hard.

After, I would go to my room and close the door.

I had stuffed animals I arranged into something that looked like a family. I would play with them for hours — a fake family, a quiet one,

one where nobody got hurt and nobody left and everybody stayed. I gave them voices. I gave them stories. I gave them the kind of home I was trying to understand.

And when the loneliness got too heavy even for that, I picked up the dictionary.

A red dictionary. I don’t know where it came from. I only know that it became mine. I would read it at night, crying, running my eyes over words I didn’t fully understand yet but felt something about. All those words. All those meanings. All that human experience compressed into definitions, waiting.

I think that’s where the writer came from.

Not from a classroom. Not from a teacher telling me I had talent. From a boy alone in a room who needed language badly enough to go looking for it in the only book he had.

The red dictionary taught me that words were alive. That they had weight. That they could hold things.

There were days I went to school with my ears black and blue.

Teachers would ask me why.

I would say I didn’t know.

I did know.

But when you are a child inside that kind of situation, protecting the person hurting you feels like the only option you have. Not because you want to. Because the alternative — saying the truth out loud — felt more dangerous than the silence.

So I carried it. Into school. Into the hallways. Into every classroom where someone looked at me and saw something wrong but didn’t push hard enough to find out what it was.

And then I went home. And I closed my door. And I picked up the red dictionary.

But here is what I learned early. Every time I left that house — every time I stepped outside those walls — the world showed me something different. People showed me love. People showed me care. People showed me compassion.

It was like discovering there was a whole other world running parallel to the one I was living in at home. A world where people looked at you and saw you. Where they asked how you were and meant it. Where kindness wasn’t conditional and safety wasn’t something you had to earn.

That contrast stayed with me my whole life. It is part of why I write the way I write. Because

I know what it feels like to be in the dark version of the world. And I know what it feels like when someone shows you the other one.

Years later, when people ask me why my writing hits the way it does, I think about that room. I think about that boy crying himself to sleep with a thousand words under his hands, absorbing all of it without knowing what he was building.

He was building a voice.

He just didn’t know it yet.