Does a tree need to be heard
to be a tree that has fallen?
Its weight cracks the air,
its body splinters the ground,
but if no ears catch the sound,
is its fall erased?

Does the forest mourn in silence?
Does the earth record its collapse?
Or is it only we who demand witnesses
to validate the quiet truths of the world?

And what of a writer?
Does a writer need to be read
to claim they are a writer?
If the words flow,
ink staining page after page,
but no eyes see their meaning,
do the words still matter?
Do they still exist?

Is the act of creating enough?
To bleed into sentences,
to carve ideas out of nothingness,
to send a whisper into the void,
not knowing if it will return.

Or is the writer like the tree,
their fall incomplete
without the witness,
their art unfinished
without the reader?

Perhaps it’s the act itself,
the fall, the writing,
that carries meaning.
A tree falls because it must,
its roots letting go of the earth.
A writer writes because they must,
their soul letting go of its silence.

And in the end,
whether seen or heard,
whether read or left unseen,
the tree still falls.
The writer still writes.

I have carried days like boulders in my pockets,
Waded through waters that swallowed my breath,
Tasting failure like salt on my tongue.
Whispering to myself,
At least I am still moving.

I have stood at the doorway of dawn,
Empty-palmed and hollow-hearted,
Unsure if effort is enough.
If simply standing, alone, can be called trying
When the ground beneath me
Never stops trembling.

I once thought grace was something given,
A voice that whispers,
You are forgiven. Or,
You are enough.
A warmth, a knowing, a certainty.

But sometimes, there is no voice.
No hand reaching through the dark.
No whisper soft enough
To quiet the doubt that enshrouds me like fog.

And I have wondered,
If grace for yourself exists, then where does it hide?
Is it something waiting to be found,
Or something I lost along the way?

What if grace is not an offering,
But an unraveling.
A loosening of the knots I have tied around myself?
What if grace is not a verdict,
But the quiet permission
To just simply be?

Not an answer,
But the right not to know.
Not a crown, but a clearing.
Not a victory, but a voice that whispers
Even here, even now, you are allowed to rest.

What if grace is letting hands that shake
Still be called steady?
Letting a weary heart
Still be called strong?
Letting the one who is simply surviving
Still be called alive?

So here I stand,
In the wreckage of all I thought I had to be,
Learning that being lost
Is not the same as being unworthy.

And maybe,
I do not have to understand grace
to receive it.
Or to deserve it.

Maybe the breath in my lungs is proof enough.

And today,
Despite that voice in my head
Yelling at me about how bad I’m doing…
With the quietude of the new sun rising,
I shall try again, to just be me.

With every beat of this unworthy heart,
with every breath drawn from grace alone, I believe.
I know that Christ is King.
Your name is my very foundation
and the truth when all else lies.

But the church,
the building, the people in it,
their voices sound like Yours.
But often, their echoes twist like
spoiled pulp falling from their lips.

I see their robes, their rituals,
their eyes scanning the pews
like farmers appraising fields for harvest.
They speak of love but wield authority,
and I wonder:
how many altars are built
for their own names?

Is it my failure, Lord?
Is it wisdom? Or deceit?
Am I weak in my faith,
or am I hearing a quiet gospel
given by You instead of by flesh?

And yet, even as I struggle,
I am judged. Not by You,
but by those who claim to know You better.
Their words sting sharper than guilt,
and their pride rises higher than their steeples.
They cast me out of their fellowship,
as if their voices hold the keys to Your kingdom.

They act as though You are theirs alone,
as though Your grace
does not overflow
onto the unworthy… onto one like me.

I know I fall short.
Every day, I feel the weight of my failures.
I am a person made of sin, and I neglect You.
and yet I come to You too,
broken but believing,
knowing that… You. Are. King.

Is this not enough?
To believe with every molecule in me?
Is it faith You want or conformity?
Is it my devotion, despite my failure,
or my submission to men who claim to know You more?

Will the last not be first?
Well, I don’t care to be first.
And I don’t care if I’m last.
All I want is to clean Your feet.

Lord, I am tired.
Tired of fighting to belong
among those who claim to carry Your name.
Tired of trying to fit into their mold,
when all I want is to be Yours.

So, I kneel where the crowd cannot see,
and I will pray. Not for their approval,
but for Your mercy. Maybe I will never be enough.
But I will live my life in quiet devotion.
Not for the applause of men,
but for the love of my Savior. The King, who died for me.

I wake each day and wonder
what shape am I supposed to take today?
Thin enough to disappear,
soft enough to comfort,
strong enough to hold the world,
but never too much of anything.

I am told to be beautiful,
but not to care too much about beauty.
To wear the mask of effortless perfection,
to hide the hours spent erasing myself
just to become something worth looking at.

My face must be smooth,
my body curved but controlled,
my hair falling like a waterfall,
not wild rivers, but streams tamed
to flow where they’re wanted.

Even the way I stand,
the way I move,
is measured by unseen rules
I never agreed to follow.

And when I try to be myself,
to break free from the mirror,
to be… something raw, untamed,
the voices still follow:

"Be softer."
"Be quieter."
"Be better."
And I try.
God knows how I try.

But no matter what I do,
I am always too much,
and never enough.
The weight of it presses down on me,
the expectations,
the impossible standards.

I carry them like stones in my chest,
grinding away at who I might have been
if I were allowed to just be.
But I am told that’s selfish too.
To want to exist outside the mold.
To be seen for who I am
instead of what I should be.

What if I’m not enough?
What if I never will be?
I am a woman,
and I’ve spent my life
trying to fit into spaces
too small for me.
And I wonder.
Will I ever stop shrinking?

Every year, I’ve gone back.
Back to my parents’ house,
back to the floor where wonder lived.
Watching small hands tear through paper
as if unwrapping the world itself.
In the laughter of my nephews and the awe in my niece,
I found the echoes of my own.
In their joy, I held the fragile magic of being a child again.
But not this year.

This year, the fire will crackle without me.
They will eat Monkey Bread, and I will not
be there to taste it.
I will not be there to see the half-eaten carrot
or the hoof prints of deer.
The gifts will pile in a room of pure wonder,
a room where I will not be,
and the spell will be theirs alone.

For the first time, I will not go back,
and the truth swells in my chest like grief:
I cannot go back.
I can never again be the boy I was,
who woke before the sun,
and who believed that mornings such as these
could infinitely glow.

That dawn has gone.
The boy’s footsteps no longer echo.
His laughter no longer rings.
And as much as I’ve tried to hold onto him,
he has slipped away,
leaving only the carved transformation
of what he has become,
through the cocoon
of a Christmas tree.

I mourn that little boy.
I mourn the weightlessness of captivation,
the smallness of a world where joy was simple,
where time stretched long enough to hold me.

That world is gone now,
and with it, the boy who belonged there.
Now I stand at the edge of myself,
looking back at all I cannot reclaim.
The door to my youth has closed,
not with the violence of finality,
but with the soft, cruel certainty of time.

And yet, the world does not wait for my grief.
A new door has opened,
and though I step through it excited and scared,
I know it is where I must go.
And I know it is where I want to be.

This year, I will sit in a different room,
beneath a tree of my own.
Beside my best friend, my wife, and the love of my life.
The air will carry the sound of our new laughter,
and soon I will hear my daughter’s own,
and I will see her little hands, and I will see her little toes,
and I will see that little smile,
so small, reaching for a world I can and will give her.
Or die trying.

I cannot go back to that little boy.
But perhaps, I can give her the mornings I once had.
Perhaps, in her joy,
I will find something even greater than what I mourn.
I am the father now.
I am the keeper of her magic.
It is my turn to wake early,
not as a boy to experience the enchantment,
but as a man to give it.
To light the tree,
to kneel on the floor and watch
as she unwraps the world for the first time.

I cannot go back.
But as I look ahead,
I see my wife’s eyes, and I see my wife’s smile,
and know that once again, I am home and
where I should be. Where I want to be.
With our hands clasped tightly,
my wife and I will create the deer prints ourselves,
and smile at one another, knowing that God
has not taken me from a home but given me
my own.

It is not the last Christmas morning,
but this has been the last of my Christmas mourning.
Praise You Jesus, for You are the grandest gift of all.

My dad just left my house.
He came over to help me put up some curtains for my daughter, who’s about to be here.
It’s just putting holes in walls, screws in the holes, and a pole on holder things that hold up the pole.
But I had to call my dad for help.
How can you call yourself a man when your own inadequacies stop you from being one?
I have a penis—
does that make me a man?
I have broad shoulders, muscular biceps and my legs and mind are strong too. I’m a big guy.
Is that what makes you a man?
I couldn’t even fucking hang up some mother fucking curtains.
How can I be a man? I know I could have, but I didn’t.
Thanks, Dad. Thanks for driving all the way over here and not making me feel like a loser.
And I don’t mean that sarcastically—you didn’t. You were happy to help.
But I’m thirty-three fucking years old. What am I going to do when you’re gone?
How will I answer my own daughter’s phone call someday and say,
“Yes, Honey, I can help you put up curtains”?
I look in the mirror and I see a male. But am I a man?
I can add two and two and make four. I know that 72,568 plus 86,725 is more than 90,000.
I can string words together into sentences too. I could put this word after that (This)- See, I did that.
I know how to write, and I know how to be patient.
But how can I be a father when being a father means being a man,
and I don’t even know what the fuck that is.
At least not the kind of man society tells me I should be.
I don’t like sports, okay? I don’t like watching them and I think it’s below my intelligence to do so. It’s not, trust me.
I just know I’m supposed to love them and I don’t and that
makes me feel like less of a man too.
I’d rather watch a play or hear an orchestra.
But I don’t leave my fucking house! So I don’t see much of those either.
Still, I do know this:
If being a man is being willing to hurt someone so badly to protect you, that my own family would be scared to look at me.
I am a man.
If being a man is being willing to sacrifice himself for you—
then…
I am a man.
If being a man is showing up. If being a man is putting up curtains when you need help.
Then I will learn how to do that
and I will be there every time you call.
I know I’m going to screw things up as your father.
I know I won’t always be good enough for you.
But if being a man is trying,
then yes,
I know I am a man.

What was I before I was here?
Before my mother’s body knew me,
before my father’s voice could call me into being?
Was I nothing;
not a shadow, not a whisper,
not even the faintest flicker of thought?
Or was I something smaller than memory,
smaller than dust on the breath of God?

The idea gnaws at me:
that there was a time when the world turned,
and I was not here to see it.
But placed in a spot where I am forced to
believe the people before me did.
The sun rose and fell,
oceans swelled and pulled away,
hearts beat and broke,
and I was no one.

How can there be nothing
before something as the soul?
If I believe I will go on,
eternal, unending,
then how could I not have always been?
How could there be a time when I was absent
from existence itself?

He says that He knew me before the womb.
He says that I was not hidden before being made
in the secret place.
He says that He chose us before the earth.
He says that He has many rooms.
He says I will not perish if I believe.

Then where was I?
And where will I go back to?

Is there a place where all things wait?
A quiet before the spark,
a pause before the breath?
Or was I truly nowhere,
not even the thought of a thought,
until God’s hands shaped me from void?

What does it mean to have never been?
To imagine a life not lived,
a name not spoken,
a body never formed?
And yet, here I am,
a meaningless thread, sewn
into a world as if I was always meant to be.
As if, just maybe, I always was.

Does that mean I was known?
That somewhere, before time,
my soul was waiting—
whole, complete,
just unseen?
Or was I with Him already? Why do I have no memory of it?
Or does it mean I am a miracle of divine intent,
created from nothing,
and yet destined to endure forever?

Faith tells me there is a plan,
that I was made for something eternal.
And if there is eternity ahead,
how could I not have existed before?
If I will go on,
unchanged by the turning of years,
how could I have begun in silence?

I do not know.
I cannot grasp the vastness of the truth.
But here I am,
caught between the mystery of what was
and the promise of what will be.
And in this moment,
I marvel at the strange, impossible gift—
that I could have never been,
but now,
I always will be.

The town still stands.
Its streets braided somewhere between cement
and a tide that never leaves.
Though their lips are smiles too long for their faces,
stagnant water rots at their doorstep beneath their feet.

The fog is coiled around the eaves
and wraps around their rooftops in a silence too loud to ignore.
But they do, all the same.
The church bell tolls,
though there are no longer any hands to pull its rope.

Silent children splash in flooded alleys.
Fisherman cast nets into waters
where nothing has stirred for in years.
No gulls cry above the shore,
no waves break against the rocks.
The Sea does not crash here, it lies, still as glass,
its depths a mirror for secrets too deep to reflect.

No one speaks of the shadows beneath the waters,
the shapes and information that ripple just past their sight.
Nor the whispers that drift through the mist,
like echoes of lives that should have ended long ago.

Despite the decay and their compulsive rot,
the grocer still sweeps water from his steps,
with a broom full of sodden reeds.
A woman hangs damp linens in air that will never let them dry.

Does no one seem to notice the tide?
Rising inch by inch, flooding their home,
drowning their psyches.
Their town is sinking.
Its hunger is endless.
Its patience is timeless.
I don’t know if it has to wait much longer either.
When it does take them,
will we even know that we’re gone?

I didn’t cry at your funeral.
I don't know why.
It’s been years now, and sometimes I imagine you, still there in the fog,
walking to the mailbox at your home in Washington.

Maybe we could go out to your garden again,
where we'd wear grocery bags over our feet.
Remember all the mist, Grandma?
Or finding the sand dollars on the shore?

After you went home, I don’t know.
Maybe, I feared looking too closely—
to touch that hidden part of me,
the part that remembers, aches, and grieves.

Years passed and the shadow of my basement,
it became a familiar friend to me.
I hid myself, like I always do,
turning from hands that tried to reach me,
hands that may have even needed me.

I am a selfish man, and I don't mean to be.
I am a man that is not only afraid of his own heart,
but I am a man afraid to leave his own house.
I reach for you in the silence, in the cracks
between breath and thought—
and sometimes, in that stillness, I feel you:
a warmth, soft as the light
that slips beneath the doors I've closed,
and locked myself behind.

They say grief is love with nowhere to go,
but my heart holds this endless weight,
this quiet ache that speaks only in whispers.

If grief is love without a place to rest,
then let mine be a garden grown in sorrow,
where every memory of you finds root,
and where, in time, I may learn to bear the fruit
of love, comparable to the depth in
which you gave to me.

Sometimes it feels like I’m climbing a mountain
that grows with every step,
its peak always hidden, and though my hands are raw,
my breath thinned by heights,
I wonder if this ascent is enough—if I am enough.

I reach, I try, I chase the shapes of dreams,
while the world spins on, and I wonder,
does it see? Does it care that I’m here,
scraping sky, or am I a whisper lost in the wind?
Do I even need or want it to care? Why do I even Ask? I already know it doesn't.

But then, there are days the light falls just right,
and I catch a glimpse—of others,
striving, silent, bearing their own invisible weights,
climbing their own invisible heights,
eyes fixed on something unseen, something felt deep.

And so I drift between days,
unseen and unheard, bearing a weight
that grows in the spaces
where dreams should be.
A heavy ache for something nameless I’ll never reach.

Perhaps we’re all alone in these hidden sorrows,
each bearing the silent burden of not enough,
moving through a world that calls for strength,
while we search for places to set down our pain.

Yet maybe the worth isn’t in the summit,
or the applause that never comes.
Maybe it’s in each step, each breath,
the steady strength it takes to rise and climb again.

I was twelve,
just a boy whose skin barely held his fears,
already a shadow of pain too sharp to share.
Then the bullet came,
hot and swift,
like a word spat out to wound
but never to take back.

The pain was a scream without a sound,
a red river pooling around me.
In that endless, fragile moment,
I wondered if this was how the world ends—
quiet, small, and still.

But it didn’t.
I lived, though not entirely.
The bullet wasn’t just lead, it was an author too—
as it rewrote who I might have become.

Something of me stayed in that car that night,
seeping into the fabric like a prayer
half-finished, but already answered and ordained.

Did he mean it?
What did you see me as when you pulled that trigger?
These questions settled like stones in my chest,
bending my back until my heart became
charred foil.

Years have slowed me now,
but when I trace the memory,
I wonder about that boy—
the boy before the bullet.
What might he have been
if he hadn’t already been a shadow,
if that bullet hadn’t tried
to turn him into one forever?

I forgave you.
That night even, as blood hardened on my skin.
I forgave you as the cops killed you.
And I’d forgive you still, even if they hadn’t.
I think I really am okay.
But are any of us, really?

We were never so close, not the way
some siblings are, but you loved me
in ways I didn’t understand then,
in ways I am only now just learning to name.

Do you remember being young,
and how you painted me as an elephant,
and we performed our grand circus act
under our parent’s smiles?

I also remember quiet things.
Your whispers, and all the times you’d say,
“I did it. Not him.”
You knew what was coming,
but you took it anyway.

And it wasn’t just that once.
It was always you, there to say, “It was me,”
The wrong turns I made,
you stood in the storm
so I could stay in the sun,
your shoulders heavy with blame
that wasn’t yours alone to carry.
But you did anyway.

You let the audience look at you with anger,
so they could look at me with love.
You let yourself be outcast,
so I could be welcomed,
your hands full of the weight of my mistakes,
your heart full of something
I am only now beginning to grasp.

How do I thank you for that?
For the way you gave yourself away,
and for the pieces of yourself you let fall,
so I could remain whole.

And though I never said it then,
and though I don’t know how to say it now:
I see you, and I love you.
Not just for who you are,
but for all the ways you saved me,
even at your own expense.

My quiet and secret hero.
A sister I would’ve chosen,
if given the chance to choose.

I didn’t know her, not really—
she was an old, quiet shadow, of what I was told she once was,
a face barely known through my eyes as a young boy,
and the ground where she lay felt no different than air,
soft beneath my shoes, green and bare.

I danced on the grave next to hers,
and the hum of a tune warmed my throat,
a melody spilling out, untouched by grief,
until my mother’s hand gripped my arm,
her voice taut as wire—Stop dancing on graves.

In that snap, the first memory of my mother doing so,
I learned silence,
the quiet weight of mourning’s tone.
I didn’t understand it then,
just the shift in her voice, a low thunder,
and how she wasn’t smiling and how my laughter stilled.

But now, grown and walking slower myself,
I think of a Christian’s death, as a crossing,
like I always have, even then,
while my innocence still was true,
not an end but a door swung wide—
and I wonder if, even then, I’d sensed a joy.

For isn’t death, to those with faith,
another kind of birth?
A step into glory, a dance beyond sorrow,
where souls shed their weight and rise anew.

Perhaps I danced because I am selfish,
perhaps I dance, because somewhere deep,
I know the grave is not the end.

And now I think of her, resting, redeemed,
of my mother’s grief, and my clumsy joy,
and how grace holds both close,
for even in silence, we lift a song,
for the dance that awaits on Heaven’s shore.

Be weary of a man too kind.
For behind the facade of his thin smile
are jagged teeth,
clenched mad with an insatiable hunger
to be pushed too far.