Back from the Quiet

I thought I was building a burnout calculator. Like it came out of an afternoon conversation with a friend. The conversation itself started out of frustration. Stagnatory distress. Existential debt dread. Anyway. Maybe my initial iteration wasn’t even a debt calculator as such. Maybe it just started out as a tool. A little web thing for exhausted teachers and professionals trying to calculate…

A few weeks ago, I had a nightmare about expats disappearing at a Thai hostel and a self-driving car with no driver. When I found an old 2018 fragment about a woman being stalked, I realized they were the same story. This is Part 2. Read [Part 1: Pine Needle Shivers here – link] and the story behind both pieces [here – link]. Chiang Mai had that asphyxiatingly sticky heat that made you feel…

A two-part psychological thriller. (Read about how this story came together) The three-storey building was a cozy place, the kind that felt safe, until it didn’t. The Happy Bodega below my apartment was a bar where people came to disappear. Dim lighting, sticky floors, and regulars who’d been sitting in the same seats since before I moved in. Men nursed the same beers and had deep, often…

A 2018 fragment, a 2025 nightmare, and the two-part thriller they became I found the fragment in a folder I don’t open much anymore, called “Writing in Progress”. It was just a page, maybe two. A woman named Sally White at a bar called the Happy Bodega, convinced someone’s following her. The file properties said 2018, though it felt older. I vaguely remember it from when I was at…

Process notes from this morning’s writing session – 10/10/2025 The Initial Impulse I started with a feeling more than an idea: that specific ache of being ghosted, when constant communication just evaporates into silence. I wanted to capture it in a haiku (since I am back on haikus for some reason). The first attempts were messy: “You’re just a ghost” (working title)Silence tortures me.Old…

Sometimes you wait years to discover what you wrote. Sometimes you decide in the moment: this matters, do something with it tomorrow. I’ve been mining old journals for years. Finding fragments from 2018, highlighting random phrases that suddenly make sense in 2025, excavating poems from experience I’d forgotten I experienced (or ideas I forgot I ever had). It works. “Suspiciously Smooth” came…

How “Suspiciously Smooth” Happened: Mining the Journal for Accidents The poem didn’t start as a poem. It started as a journal entry about airports and transitions, the kind of travel writing where you’re trying to capture movement and displacement without knowing what you’re actually trying to say. India Journal 2023 Look at the highlighted sections. They’re not sequential. They’re not even…

From my travel journals, Bangkok to Delhi. Found in the margins years later. There’s a disarrayin the urban decaya velvety smoothtransitioninto chaos.

From my journals in India, 2023. Finished two years later. Held in the currents,cellular memory speaks. A blueprint of becoming formsan embryo of self.

Written during my time in Rishikesh, where the internal work of yoga teacher training meant confronting all the fractured parts I’d been carrying. There’s something about being in a place dedicated to spiritual seeking that forces you to actually look at what needs healing. The stillness wasn’t comfortable, it was where all the discord became visible. But that’s also where the weaving back…

I’ve been thinking about patterns that stick across time and place. Small habits that follow us through different lives, different countries, different versions of ourselves. Sometimes the things we do without thinking reveal more than the things we plan. There is something revealing about subconscious action, and the intentionality of what we do when we don’t actively think. This reflection…