Recent Nonfiction
Ouroboros
Written June 1, 2026
I forgot about the total quiet in living alone. Its not silence, as you still hear the home breathing, but its an eager inhale of anticipation.
I forgot about the ears, begging for noise, tuning into any human sound, the thud of a dropped object from an apartment above, the shouts of Saturday night voices from an indiscernible location, the shuffling of grocery bags when a neighbor comes back home. So, one gets a pet, a dog or cat to add noise to the place and a distraction from the mind. Or, one plays the television loud enough to be heard from another room, so as to not feel so lonely when one walks away. Podcasts, of course, are included, for when you tire so much so of your thoughts, that you listen to those of another.
I forgot about the eyes, begging for sight of another person, so you become a watcher, peaking through blinds and the front door’s peephole just to see who is walking by. You observe others, picking up their scraps of conversations and savoring the bones of the remains long after the meat is gone. Perhaps that is both impetus and fate of everyone that calls themselves a writer. Loneliness, or a longing for human connection, turns into collecting the seeds of a stranger’s soul, their words, emotions, behaviors, to sort through and inspect on the page. We nature seeds for them to bloom, but also take the flower and suck it dry of its petals and life force. An ouroboros.
A Rooftop of My Own
Posted to Substack on May 12, 2026
“Would you like to go up to the rooftop?” She asks, filling my water cup with ice and electrolytes, while her dog paces around the apartment kitchen, which is filled with the afternoon sun from floor-to-ceiling windows that furnish the apartment with no shadows.
The rooftop has the best view I’ve seen of the heart of the city, where I feel like a boy’s drone that he sends buzzing into the air with knobs on a remote. I hide my enthusiasm. Even the word rooftop makes me feel fancy. “I’d love to go to the rooftop.”
So we go up a sketchy stairwell, which like all stairwells I’m happy to note is creepy, even in a luxury apartment. Then with a push of the exit door, we are out of the concrete liminal space and flooded immediately with sunlight as we step onto the rooftop patio, cool stones beneath our feet, lounge chairs abound, a pool—not deep, but aesthetically pleasing with its angles—and a pair of thickly cushioned ottomans where were sink into the Texas heat and overlook Cesar Chavez, the main pedestrian bridge, cars that now look like worker ants in the Saturday night traffic, and a surprising landscape of verdure trees and grass from the recent rains.
She is the most successful person I know. I try to gain inspiration and motivation from her like a sponge. We are on two different paths (her self-employed to my public service job), but we converge more in friendship dynamics, values, and dreams than either of us may have expected upon our first meeting. Therefore, our friendship has remained uninterrupted for years now, despite small hiccups or the occasional held breath.
So backwards we recline and forward our legs and toes stretch—hers with a golden glitter pedicure from last month’s trip to California. We fall into our regular pattern. She speaks and I listen. We pause, break eye contact, and inhale. She changes to a different topic and I nod. I like it this way.
For so long its almost comical there has been a predictable pattern, where if she is doing well, I know misfortune will hit me. On the other hand, if I feel like my life is in an upswing, hers will be tumultuous. If I don’t know where either of us stand, I can only brace for impact.
She speaks to her romantic relationship, its troubles, and consequently, other romantic pursuits in a new adoption of polyamory. She speaks to positivity and opportunity and deciding whether or not to resign her lease. I try not to squirm at the vista in front of us. Leave this behind? I begin to miss it already, mourning this secondhand experience. But I know if there were to be any better, she would find it.
There is a sudden waft of grilled meat that we both cringe at. There are men in the pool negotiating amongst themselves about negotiating better salaries. Two of them sound drunk, but it may just be their vocal fry, signaling their careers in finance.
“I’m someone who takes action,” she says. “There’s little to no gap between what I want and what I have.”
I nod, because its true. Not that she’s impulsive, though she can be, nor driven, though that’s correct too, but she’s never without direction or momentum.
“They just don’t take action like me. They want to be a rockstar and an actor, but they don’t do anything to reach that.”
She’s not talking about me, I know, but her words reverberate in my mind all the same. Am I taking enough action to my goals and dreams?
As we reach the part in our conversation when I finally open up, needing the time and sun to open up my voice, I speak about my dreams. Like I always do. For years now, we talk about her successes and my dreams.
When will I reach her level? When will we talk about my successes? When will I have a rooftop of my own?
On Haircuts
Posted to Substack on June 2, 2026
Before I fell asleep, I would braid my hair, weaving the three cords together like how I would fold the same thoughts into themselves over and over again, until I was ready to lay on my pillow and dream the same dreams as all the nights before. I worshipped my hair: cared and nurtured it, oiled it and smoothed it, perfected its movement and trained it into submission, flattening down its body and life until every wave straightened.
They say that hair holds the past, and I wasn’t sure how right they were until I cut mine off. I released eight inches of the past. They say you can have one hundred thousand hairs on your head; a number that is impossible to count in a lifetime, like the incomprehensible amount of thoughts you can have in a day.
The sheddings of hair stick to the inside waistband of my pants, cover my collarbones in a balding fur, and tickle the hollows of my face, underneath my eyes and cheekbones. The remnants of me refuse to fall away. Before, my hair laid like a cape across my back. Now, it brushes the back of my neck in ghostly touches.
The hairstylist was named America, an apt name as she cut away strands of my past to free and style my present. Her fingers snapped the scissors like the Fates snipping threads of life. She swept away my mass of hair until it sat dead in the corner, shaped disturbingly like roadkill. “Do you want to see?” She asked, like we were viewing a snuff film.
I severed my own limb and now I have phantom pains. I brush my hair until my wrist brushes the air. I reach to gather the bundle of the safety net, only to come back empty-handed. I try to tilt my chin to hide my face only to realize the curtain isn’t long enough anymore. But when I look in the mirror, I smile.