memories
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Autumn isn’t just a season you experience. It seems to create a different version of you. You become more introspective, nostalgic, romantic, restless, sentimental—perhaps even a little haunted. But every autumn, I don’t become someone different.I become more and more myself. I embrace my desire for old books and late-night fires. I stare too long…
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Inspiration has terrible timing. She never arrives when you’ve scheduled an afternoon to write. She doesn’t care that you’ve made coffee, lit a candle, or finally have an uninterrupted hour. Instead, she appears while you’re driving home, standing in line at the grocery store, or halfway through dinner when someone says a sentence so beautiful…
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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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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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We leave traces of ourselves everywhere. Initials are carved into trees. Locks are fastened to bridges. We paint, we journal, we write songs. Our newest obsession is scattering fragments of ourselves across social media, preserving thoughts that might otherwise vanish with the passing day. Why do we do this? We know, whether we admit it…
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“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy One of my favorite lines in literature, but we are often more alike in our unhappiness than we realize. Each family’s pain manifests differently, in varying intensity, yet these truths exist in nearly every household. The saddest part…
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You walked to our lives as if you were a kind of balm designed to cure what never healed. Instead You ripped through us, almost gleeful as we bled into the open air, but healing doesn’t need to wound flesh just to prove it was broken. You damaged us just so you could pretend heal…
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The American South has a way of speaking. Down here, the air holds onto secrets, sorrow, and the quiet weight of being human. South Louisiana has its own way of revealing what lingers. Here are some ways Louisiana hints at her secrets… Every reason has its own secrets that are slowly revealed to…
Black Ink and Parchment 