Welcome to Black Ink and Parchment, a place where words linger like smoke and stories unfold in the quiet spaces between heartbeats. Here, you’ll find my latest reflections on love, loss, longing, and the fragile threads that bind us together.

If poetry speaks to you—the kind that aches, haunts, and stays—wander over to my poetry page for glimpses into my newest collections.

And if you’re drawn to shadows and secrets, step into my Cypress Mills novels… set in a fictional Louisiana town where the air is thick with mystery, and nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Thank you for being here.

  • People often speak about darkness and emptiness as though they are the same thing. Both can arrive quietly, make us feel uncertain, and change the way we see ourselves, but only one is full of possibility while the other is defined by absence. Learning the difference may be one of the most important things we ever…

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  • Picture yourself standing at the edge of a cliff. You feel the wind pulling at your clothes. Your heart beats a little faster as you peer over the edge, imagining what it would feel like to leap. For a brief moment, every possibility exists. You picture the rush, the freedom, the exhilaration of flight. Then,…

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  • Have you ever fallen in love with a possibility? Not who someone was, but who they could become. Perhaps you imagined the future version of them: the one who finally kept their promises, conquered their fears, communicated openly, or became the person they always claimed they wanted to be. You saw the rough edges and…

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  • We rarely know people as well as we think we do. Instead, we know fragments. From those conversations, profiles, and moments, we build stories. We fill in the missing pages with assumptions, hopes, fears, and expectations until the person standing before us becomes partly real and partly imagined. Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects…

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  • Death has always been one of humanity’s greatest mysteries. For as long as people have existed, we have told stories about it. We have imagined it as a guide, a judge, a ferryman, a shadow, a skeleton, an angel, and a companion. We have feared it, worshipped it, cursed it, and tried desperately to understand…

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  • Looking Up

    For thousands of years, humanity has lifted its gaze toward the night sky in search of meaning. Long before telescopes and satellites, the stars served as maps, calendars, stories, and guides. Ancient civilizations built myths around constellations, tracked the seasons through celestial movements, and believed the heavens held messages meant for those willing to listen.…

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  • The story of Pandora’s Box is one of those myths that survives long after childhood. We encounter it in literature classes, mythology books, and casual references, often hearing the same simplified version: Pandora opened a forbidden box, released all the evils of the world, and left humanity to suffer the consequences. Yet hidden within the…

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  • Watery Memories

    Memory moves like in quiet streams threading through the underbrush of the mind, or they are swollen rivers carving the soft earth of who we become. Some days it trickles. Other days it floods, rising without warning, swallowing whole landscapes we thought we had left behind. We like to think of memory as fixed and…

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  • There is a peculiar satisfaction in discovering a word for something you’ve felt your entire life. Language is a catalogue of human experience, preserving emotions, habits, and personalities across centuries. The following words illuminate the hidden corners of human nature and offer new ways to understand both ourselves and those around us. Saudade (noun)A deep,…

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  • I’ve selected some of my poetic prose lines from my poetry books and social media pages that explore the many forms loss can take: the loss of love, identity, certainty, belonging, innocence, possibility, and time itself.  Enjoy. I’ve waited my entire life to feel this way about someone. (I don’t know if it was worth…

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