“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” — John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent I broke my nose my freshman year of college. At my school, we prepare for something called Sea Trials, a 13-hour evolution of…

A Letter to my Children Have you ever fallen So hard That your lungs hit your ribs And took your breath The game stops The crowd pauses To help you up And you stand Your lungs still ache Your eyes, still smarting With pain, with sorrow With tears “I’m okay” They smile and wander away Brushing off dirt Still you stand Alone on the pavement Standing still on the pitch What is resilience, my love? Walking on.

A Letter to the Light in our Lives You harassed me constantly. “Jaaaccckkiiiieeee, when are you going to write a blog post about me?” You’d always read my posts over our stint in summer school, lamenting the fact that I had missed writing about the most important person in the…

Even if he was one of the few doing it, he always stood and saluted. You can take the old colonel out of the military, but you can’t take the pride out of the colonel. …

oh, genius breeds a lovely art when touched by grief’s dark stain for those who have feel it feel it once and dare not feel again sit awhile in a room veiled in shadow and put your palms o’er your eyes remove them and see darkness, oh frustration try on being a writer for size place your pen in your veins oh, bleed out the words don’t stop when your head spins this pain has purpose to serve for there are others who sit

“This is what being buried feels like, Jack.” The cold table I was laying on faltered a little bit as the nurse pumped her foot to lift me into the MRI machine. The motor was probably worn, but I joked with the nurse about how I had forced a malfunction…

How I Went Running and Remembered a Basic Human Function I got annoyed Thursday. Running through the streets of a typical American city, the rocking of my foot felt comfortable. Heel, toe, heel, toe. Left, right, left, right. A familiar rhythm in a world that feels anything but. Sweat, stoplights…

You know, it used to be ice cream. We’d be driving back from a family dinner at the local pub or cheap Mexican restaurant — you know, the one in your hometown with the terrible neon sign and the greasy, shellacked tables. On the way home, there was a little…

Hunched over at a funeral Crying my eyes out over someone I’ve never met There were just enough seats in the chapel For the people to sit And the grief to cram into the pews That’s how we felt it The unlucky who had never met this kind soul We…