thoughts

  • Walking With My Father

    Walking With My Father

    I had a dream last night that stayed with me long after I opened my eyes. It felt real in that quiet way some dreams do. In the dream I was walking with my dad at Christmastime. We were at Northwest Plaza in St. Louis, going to see Santa, and I was maybe four years…

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  • Gratitude, Without the Myth

    Gratitude, Without the Myth

    Thanksgiving is a time to understand the meaning of gratitude and thankfulness.

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  • The Hidden Tokyo

    Tokyo is a city that never really sleeps. It hums, it glows, it moves like electricity through glass. But that is not the Tokyo I chase. The one I love lives quietly behind it all, in the soft hum after the song ends. It is the Tokyo that hides under stairways, down narrow alleys, and…

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  • The America We Were Sold

    I wish I still believed in the United States of America we were sold when we were kids. You remember the one. The country built on the solid foundation of freedom. The place where all men were said to be created equal, and where anyone could achieve the American dream if they worked hard enough.…

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  • Still Standing

    There are times when I wish I could go back to the days before I saw the darkness for what it really is. Before I understood how deep it runs, not just through the world, but through people too. The difficulty comes when once you have seen that darkness, you cannot unsee it. You cannot…

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  • The Kind of September

    “Try to remember the kind of September.” That line has been echoing in my head all day, and maybe it is because September once carried a very different meaning. When I was young, Labor Day was not just a holiday. It was the last day of freedom before school began again. In St. Louis, we…

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  • There is a case to be made that Frankenstein is not just a gothic novel or a cautionary tale about science, but also one of the earlier works of queer literature. Mary Shelley wrote it at nineteen, surrounded by the radical thinkers of her time, many of whom challenged the norms of love, gender, and…

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  • We have always told stories to understand fear. Around ancient fires, in the flickering torchlight of castles, and later in the dim glow of movie theaters, humanity shaped its deepest anxieties into creatures. We gave our fears teeth and claws, wings and fangs, scales and shadows. We called them monsters, but really, they were always…

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  • To Outlive Them All

    Death itself has never been the thing that frightened me. What terrifies me is the thought of losing everyone I love before my own time comes. That fear has been stitched into me over the years, thread by thread, through loss after loss. When you are young, you believe there is time. You imagine decades…

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  • Nightmares are not fiction. They are truths that bleed through our dreams, warnings we cannot always name. Glow begins there, in the still hours of the night, where fear has no shape until it presses its weight on your chest. Sleep paralysis, shadow figures, the demon crouched at the edge of your bed. Science gives…

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