Chapter I: The Imprint of Home

When I’m meeting people in my new life, I want to ask: How do I begin to tell you just how much home burns inside me? How do I tell you that I’m not really here all the time? How do I tell you that I carry the traumas of everyone back there, that when you look at me, the imprint of that love is coming through my body to you?

I would tell you that more often, my mind is in my childhood home, hearing the morning birds sing like they used to, the backdrop to whispered stories told by the light of black and milds with bloodshot eyes.

ODs, suicide, alcohol, abuse, assault, bullying, broken families.

All these unspoken things laid dormant in every young man’s heart.

Through all the violence, at seventeen, I found these men who made me believe in love, who gave me something that felt true, who taught me how to laugh, who showed me I could feel joy.

But there were stolen moments and secrets: blood on the leaves and the snow, birds’ bodies beheaded every Christmas; tears hidden only for night, save the fear of weakness being discovered; the solace of winter, quiet frozen lakes, and how we shared the silence.

The Pocono chill will always be inside of me. We were boys in the mountains, boys on my back porch, boys living in a mystery. My camera met it all: fog & smoke & obscurity.

The further I get from those days, the more I realize I never knew, that I won’t know, anything at all: Maybe aside from the stroke of a match. And the way sometimes everything burns away and we let it.

I’ll remember watching you all become yourselves, the way you showed me manhood could mean a million things.

More than just flames that ruin everything in their path—the fire I once thought I was growing up in.

That will always be the home that is inside of me: All of those young men whose memory I keep.

Whose memory I keep to remind me that I am still, always, that boy, holding everyone in my heart, wanting us all to live.