Someone told me that a classmate of his died partway through the year, in middle school. What he remembers, decades later, is that no one sat in the boy's lunch chair. That's the whole memory. Not the boy — the chair. Nobody decided this. No teacher announced a mourning period, no group of twelve-year-olds voted … Continue reading Grief: The Empty Chair and the Mirror Box
Category: reading
Zuihitsu, 2026-Q2
These aren’t polished essays or tidy aphorisms. They’re scraps I’ve carried around this month—half-heard thoughts, borrowed lines, sudden recognitions—that refused to be forgotten. Zuihitsu literally means “following the brush,” and while my version is shorter and scrappier than the classical form, the impulse feels the same: to catch what drifts across the mind before it … Continue reading Zuihitsu, 2026-Q2
