Subscribe now

✦

A Question for You

What's a place you loved enough to grieve and had to leave anyway to finally heal?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

✦

A Question for You

Has anyone ever looked at you like the answer was already yes?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Behind the Story

I wrote Jerry first, though you haven’t met him yet.

He lives in a darker story I’m not ready to publish. A man at the bottom of a glass, held up by a friend, carrying something he hasn’t said out loud.

Jessamy is what comes after.

She arrived almost by sound. The name felt like Jerry’s reflection, the same shape worn by gentler hands. I loved her before I’d written a line. There’s old healing tucked somewhere in the root of the name.

The hardest part of leaving was never the leaving in some relationships.

It’s the after. The body that learned to brace itself, still bracing in a room where nothing is coming for it.

Jerry trusts Jessamy. He says so plainly. But trust lives in the mind, and the body keeps its own score. He flinches at the very tenderness he wants. He hears her kindness in someone else’s voice.

That’s the part we rarely say out loud. How the people who hurt us lend their memory to the people who don’t.

I wanted the scene to hold both at once. A man healing and a man haunted, same breath, same hand.

Because we carry the debts of old love into new beds. We hand a stranger the bill for someone else’s cruelty, and it isn’t fair to them, and it isn’t fair to the person we actually are now.

His is a severe case, but the shape of it is ordinary. Most of us have made someone pay for a debt they didn’t run up.

They lay still until the trembling slowed.
They breathed until the room stopped being the old room.
They stayed until his hand, at last, believed hers.

The smallest yes. A palm going soft.

On the Visual Process

The whole story is told through hands.

I didn’t decide that up front; it surfaced as I worked the storyboard. The cover, the embrace, the last touch, all the same gesture from different distances.

A hand is where trust gets decided. It’s the first thing to flinch and the first thing to soften.

Light does the heavy lifting. I let it pool only where the two of them are touching and let the rest of the bed fall into the dark. Bodies lit at the point of contact and nowhere else.

It mirrors how Jerry moves through the night. The world narrows to the warm circle of a hand, and everything past its edge stays uncertain.

I break the scene three times on purpose, with the glass frames. The lines on them, Words that broke. And somehow, he believed her. Soft enough to believe, aren’t moments in the bedroom. They’re moments in his head. Cracked glass as memory intruding.

In the mirror shard, his own face comes back fractured. The past doesn’t only hurt you. It splinters how you see yourself.

One small choice I love: when Jessamy says, I’m not her, I would never, I drew the bubble with a dashed outline instead of a solid one. It’s barely spoken. A near-whisper, the kind of thing you say so softly it almost doesn’t get said. Later, I found out that is how you depict whispering in comics.

I paired it with the broken glass running through the story. He picks up the pieces and looks back at his own face in them. Translucent but reflective.

✦

A Question for You

Have you ever had to teach your body to trust what your heart already knew?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Behind the Story

I wrote this for National Spouse Day a few years ago. It is June now, but it still fits at the turn of the summer. It is really about a question I keep returning to. What does partnership look like when nobody is watching, and nothing is easy?

So I imagined forward. I pictured a version of us with a child, because that scene strips love down to its working parts. The diaper. The stroller heavy with food. The cry at midnight.

None of it is glamorous. All of it is real.

I wanted to see who we would be in those moments, and I already know the answer because I see it now, in smaller ways. One of us reaches before the other asks. The work splits itself, clean and wordless, like water finding its level.

I kept counting to two on purpose. Two hands. Two legs. Two hearts. I never wanted us to dissolve into one person. We stay distinct. We just keep choosing the same direction until the choosing becomes a rhythm.

“Always” is the smallest word I had and the heaviest. It is part promise, part observation. By the last line, it stops being a vow and becomes a description. It is simply what partnership is, or what I believe it can be.

This is my way of acknowledging her. Not with a grand gesture but with the quiet certainty that whatever we carry, we carry it the same way. Together.

✦

A Question for You

I would love to hear about the small ways your person shows up for you in your life.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Behind the Story

In case a future never came.

A line that feels familiar but has uncommon phrasing. We don’t often reckon with the idea of losing tomorrow. It is a too-real possibility always in the background, not acknowledged unless juxtaposed with the uncertainty of death.
We carry the possibility of loss the way we carry our own heartbeat, steady, without looking at it directly.

Bésame Mucho was written in 1940 by Consuelo Velázquez. She was twenty-four, and the world was at war. I can only imagine what she was carrying when she wrote it, but I feel it in the song. That particular ache of someone who understands, maybe for the first time, that a goodbye might mean exactly what it says.

There's a moment in the song where the melody drops, and the plea underneath becomes impossible to ignore. Kiss me. As if tonight might be the last time. I've heard it a hundred times, and that drop still does something to my chest.

I don't think we're meant to live in fear. But I think the most honest love keeps that fear somewhere in the room. The way a candle reminds you of the dark. In those moments when that fear steps out of the background, not only do we embrace it, but we also stay present and love as we've never loved before.

On the Visual Process

How can I showcase this feeling of fear tomorrow while also embracing all the love that could possibly exist? That was the question. I pondered hard for a couple of weeks, working on this zine’s storyboard. How do I bring that background fear into life?

I came up with several ideas and situations, but the one that stood out was a simple yet relatable goodbye.

I drew on my own time in the military for this one, the specific texture of those goodbyes. The way people hold on to the past beyond the point where it makes practical sense.

The way the body tries to memorize something before the mind has agreed to let it go. I’ve stood in terminals like that one. I’ve watched others stand in them. There’s a particular stillness at the center of all that noise that I wanted the panels to hold.

The image I kept returning to was a camera slowly spinning, the terminal noise blurring into the background, two people coming into focus as if the rest of the world had agreed to step aside for a moment.

That was the visual logic for the whole zine. Every panel builds toward the same thing: narrowing the frame until only they exist.

The closing image, him kissing her again as she begins to blur into the terminal, was what the zine was always moving toward. The question, the tears, the foreheads touching. All of it is weight being gathered, so that the final panel can carry it.

I wanted the fear to be visible without being named. The blurring is the fear.

✦

A Question for You

Have you ever let yourself love without holding anything back, just for one moment beyond the fear?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Behind the Story

There’s a lyric in Sam MacPherson’s “Backseat (All I Got)” that stopped me the first time I heard it.

Nobody breaks up in the backseat.

Just that. The whole story in one line.

The song is about surface tension. The held breath of a relationship already over, two people sitting inside the illusion of it anyway. Not out of cruelty. Out of something that looks a lot like tenderness but is really just avoidance.

I knew that feeling. I knew it at seventeen, sitting next to someone I cared about and couldn’t find the words to leave. Not because the feeling was gone. Because I didn’t know how to be honest without becoming the person who hurt them.

Looking back, what surprises me is how much I convinced myself I was being kind.

What I didn’t want to write was a story about a bad person. Sam isn’t a villain. He’s someone caught between a good memory and an honest moment, choosing the memory because the moment feels too sharp to hold.

That’s not cruelty.

The rain in the illustration came later. But it was always there in the feeling. Something that falls on everything equally. The ending and the beginning. The lie and the truth underneath it.

It doesn’t choose sides. It just keeps coming down.

On the Visual Process

The zine opens on a cover saturated in cool, rain-drenched tones, the couple barely visible through fogged glass. They are close and look held. The blue light makes it look like something worth keeping.

That is what makes it uncomfortable to look at.

That was the mood I wanted to set before the story even begins. Not dramatic, not violent, but muted. The way grief looks when it hasn’t broken open yet.

The rest of the panels were built around that same contrast: the warmth of the couple’s closeness against the cold of rain-streaked windows. Sam holds her. His face gives nothing away. It all looks fine.

What surprised me working through the visual references was how much tenderness can exist in a moment that is quietly ending. How two people can look like love from the outside and feel like something else entirely from within.

Then there is panel seven.

A heart drawn in condensation on the fogged glass, paired with the line: so he kept the lies between their mouths, soft as breath. Neither character drew it. It just appeared, the way the truth of a moment sometimes does, outside of anyone’s awareness, in the space between two people who aren’t saying the thing.

✦

A Question for You

Have you ever chosen a good memory over an honest moment?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Behind the Story

There are some lines you carry for years before you understand what they were asking of you.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

I recall this didn’t make sense to me when I first read it. Then I lived a little. Traveled far. Learned about love, and the contrast of having loved. Now I read it as a reminder. And a how-to for the love that traces what hurts and stays anyway.

This scene is a tender moment. A man who has been wearing his pain like a coat for so long that it became the only thing keeping him warm. A woman willing to stay close enough to feel the cold he was hiding. Not flinching. Not fixing. Just there.

I wanted to write the moment a person stops bracing. Sometimes that shows up in moments of intimacy behind closed doors. The scars. The trauma. The hesitation. The breath after a long-held breath. Trust shows up first as a small permission.

It’s all right.

Two words that take a lifetime to receive.

Some loves arrive wanting your best self. The rare ones know how to sit with the worst. They become the warmth beyond the doubt. They wait until the cold veil lifts. They hold until the night stops feeling cold. They stay until you can sleep.

On the Visual Process

Creating this story was fun and challenging. It was one of my first illustrations to storyboard. I honed in on the feeling of the quote, bit by bit, until the scene came alive before my eyes like spoken word poetry.

I wanted this piece to feel like a low lamp in a dark room. The bedroom is all soft grays. The only color in the whole zine is on the cover. Her, for contrast. Peach. Bruised lavender. A white shirt big enough to disappear inside of. She wears it the way you wear borrowed grace. Loose, unguarded, his.

I loved the balcony serving as a backdrop to the night that had passed. Letting the reader fall into the cooing night and fill in the gaps of what conversations had transpired.

The balcony at the beginning is empty. A bottle. An ashtray is still smoking. Whatever happened out there is finished. They left it behind to go inside, and the night they walked away from is still humming on the rail.

Despite being a comic-style scene, his and her expressions add to the intimacy. She is ready and willing. He is trusting her and is open to being guided every step of the way. She genuinely loves him, and he, despite his doubt, embraces her. She doesn’t judge him for it.

By the last panel, intimacy gets to look the way it feels. Cosmic, slow, and quietly enormous. The bodies kept their outlines but lost their weight. There is starlight where the body should be, and warmth they have somehow made between them, holding both of them still inside the dark.

Her hand finds his chest. His hands hold her at the thighs, the way you hold a thing you’d be ruined to lose.

Some kinds of closeness, I think, were always going to be drawn as stars.

✦

A Question for You

Has anyone ever stayed for the weight you’d been carrying alone?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Behind The Story

All the stories here begin with a song; its lyrics, its mood, the feeling it carries. The premise is mostly the same each time: What if life were a movie? What scene, what moment, would best fit this song?

Moon River is such a classic. Its melody first captured my heart with strings of longing and bittersweet heartache, the kind that reminds you that you are indeed alive, that through the years, through the scars, you have lived.

The idea that I have been fortunate enough to love has consoled me, kept me hopeful, in every pursuit of love I’ve ever known. This particular version, the jazzy one by Sweet Green, brought me there. To a place where longing finds company in the past, the present, and the future all at once.

I often find myself reminiscing on the what-ifs and could-have-beens. It’s a fine line, I know. But it can’t be helped when something moves you that way, plays your inner chords, connects you beyond time and this life.

You could say I was simply reveling in the moment, in the scene with myself like a daydream, drifting, hoping to run into someone I would, without a doubt, be happy to see again.

On the Visual Process

I wanted this piece to feel like a held breath.

The crowd around Lucy is mostly faceless. Heads, shoulders, the suggestion of someone there, but never quite people. Only what she recognizes comes into focus.

His hands. His face. Her own body, finally visible to him from above the crowd. The only color in the room.

Everything else softens at the edges, the way memory blurs the edges of a room when you’re looking too hard at one thing.

Some songs only finish in the room they were started in.

✦

💭 A Question for You

Has a song ever returned you to a person you thought you'd let go?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

📖 Behind the Story

When I wrote this, I didn’t know yet whether it was a love story or a warning.

I wrote it on purpose so it could be both.

That’s the most honest thing I know how to say about this particular kind of love. The kind that asks you to come pick it up at 2 AM. The kind whose presence makes any plan feel right. The kind you keep keys in hand for.

Some of you will read this and think: that’s devotion. That’s what showing up actually looks like.

Some of you will read this and think: I’ve been here. That’s how it starts.

You wouldn’t be wrong. Either of you.

I think most of us have driven half an hour at 2 AM for someone we loved and probably shouldn’t have. Felt the exhaustion just disappear. Told ourselves the stars looked beautiful when really we were just looking at them, and they were already somewhere else entirely.

When I heard “Drive Away” by The Brummies and Kacey Musgraves, I saw the whole thing before I wrote a single word. The phone was glowing in the dark. Keys already in hand. The road opens up ahead of her. The song never once tells you what to feel about it, and I didn’t want to either.

On the Visual Process

I decided early on that we’d never really see him.

In the film strip panels, he shows up in profile, half-framed, like a photo that didn’t quite come out. And when they’re finally in the car together, he’s there — blurred, out of focus in that specific way where you’re looking right at them and still can’t quite make them out.

The zine goes back and forth between two things: the illustrated panels, which are hers, and the film strip panels, which are kind of... his.

His voice. The road. The whiskey glass. The keys.

That split became a motif, a way to give each of them a visual language without ever putting them on equal footing.

She gets to be fully drawn. He becomes a recurring image.

The warm glow from the first panel, her phone lighting her face in the dark, doesn’t come back. After that, it’s cooler. Streetlight, headlights, open road. The further she drives, the darker it gets.

And the keys close the story the same way they open it. She already had them in her hand. Before she said yes, before she even asked where he was.

That’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it?

The story doesn’t change. Only the reader does.

And maybe that’s what this kind of love does, too. It stays exactly the same, 2 AM after 2 AM, phone call after phone call.

It’s the person behind the wheel who has to decide what to make of that.

✦

💭 A Question for You

Have you ever picked someone up, literally or figuratively, and only later realized how much it cost you?

Leave a comment

📖 Behind the Story

Some pain announces itself. It walks in the front door, knocks over the furniture, and makes you call someone. That’s not the pain I wanted to draw.

The pain I wanted to draw is the kind that gets quiet. The kind that fits between your ribs, that lets you keep driving, that makes you say things like “I’m fine” and almost believe it. The kind that comes wrapped in two pills and a steering wheel and a voice on the other end of the phone you can’t quite hear.

Marcus isn’t a stranger.

He’s the cousin you texted last week. The coworker who started laughing too easily. The person you might have been once, when something hard happened, and the easiest thing was to just keep moving.

When I heard Noah Kahan’s “Growing Sideways” for the first time, what hit me wasn’t the metaphor itself. It was how casual it sounded. How he sings about therapy and meds and panic and disappearing, all in this loose, almost cheerful melody.

That’s what depression looks like in a lot of us, isn’t it? Not crying on the floor. Just driving sideways.

What I wanted to capture in this piece is the moment before someone breaks. The moment they choose, very quietly, not to. Not because they don’t want to feel. But because they don’t trust themselves to survive it.

On the Visual Process

The cover opens on two pills, golden and lit from within, the only warmth in the entire piece.

By the final panel, they’ve gone grey.

That shift was the first visual decision and the most deliberate. What looks like relief at the start looks like something else entirely by the end.

Marcus moves between concealment and exposure. The early panels keep him hunched, face buried. Then there’s a full panel: eyes forward, rain streaking the glass, nowhere to hide.

That’s where the zine asks its hardest question.

Later, he appears only in the rearview mirror, watching himself drive away from the moment.

The text panels break the sequence like a held breath. Cracked and shattered textures behind the words, because some things can only be said on a surface that’s already broken.

The phone call is the hinge. Someone reaches out. He answers. He says “it’s okay.” He drives on.

And the road blurs behind him.

💭 A Question for You

What’s a song you put on when you can’t quite say what you’re feeling?

Song: “Growing Sideways” — Noah Kahan

Leave a comment

Falling in love is not magical on its own; we make it so along the way. It is not a decision but rather an ever-present choice.

We’ve been sold a particular story about love.

That it arrives like weather — sudden, overwhelming, out of your hands. That the falling is the thing. That if you have to work at it, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

I used to believe some version of that.

And then I started paying attention to the love that actually lasts. The kind you see in the way someone reaches for their person’s hand without thinking. The way they still make coffee the way the other likes it, twenty years in.

The small, unremarkable gestures that are, if you look closely, anything but.

That’s not magic. That’s making.

There’s a difference between falling and staying. Falling happens to you. Staying is something you choose, not once, at an altar or in a moment of certainty, but every ordinary day.

In choosing to come home. In choosing to listen. In the arm that still reaches for her, after all these years, quiet and unhurried, as if it has always known the way.

That’s the love I find myself in awe of. Not the breathless beginning. Though that’s its own kind of beautiful, but the love that has weathered something. That has been tested and frayed and chosen again anyway.

The magic, it turns out, is something we build.

And maybe the most romantic thing two people can do is keep choosing each other long after the falling has settled into something quieter and far more profound.

✨ In the comments, I'd love to hear your thoughts:

What does choosing look like in the love you’ve witnessed or lived, the small, everyday gestures that say I’m still here?

Leave a comment

Her eyes were hungry for something I couldn't name,
        as if she were seeing me for the first time.

"It's so easy to love you," I said,
        truth slipping straight from my soul.

        "You love me?" she teased, her eyes widening playfully,
        though she'd heard the words a hundred times before.

"I felt it the moment I saw you," I replied —

        sinking to one knee.


"You changed my life the instant you appeared,
changed the way I see the world.
It's written in the stars, you know?
        You and I…
And I want to spend every last day of my life with you."

Her eyes filled with tears,
        hands flying to her erratic heartbeat.


        "I can't believe this…"


"Well, believe it," I whispered.

"Because I can't go another day
without telling you what you are to me.
        What you've become."


Will you marry me?

I didn't need her answer;
        her eyes had said yes long before her lips did.

But hearing it aloud…

It was better than the moment everything changed.

        Better than seeing her for the very first time.

✍️ Author’s Note

I wrote this one late at night, Camila’s Todo Cambió playing on repeat while the rest of the house was quiet. There’s a line in that song that kept stopping me — the one about everything changing in a single moment. I must have replayed it a dozen times before I understood what it was trying to tell me.

We talk about love as something gradual. Accumulating. A slow tide. And mostly, that’s true. But sometimes there really is a before and after. A single moment that doesn’t just mark a change. It rewrites the whole story. Makes you look back at every ordinary morning differently.

That’s what I wanted this piece to hold. Not the spectacle of a proposal. Not the hidden ring or the witnesses or the choreography. But the paradox underneath it all.

How you can know someone completely, have told them you love them a hundred times over coffee going cold on the counter.

And yet saying it this way makes it feel like the very first time all over again.

The kneeling isn’t a ritual here. It’s the moment something that was always already true finally gets its shape.

Some loves begin with a feeling. The best ones end with a choice.

💭 A Question for You

Do you think love gets better the longer you choose it?

Leave a comment

✦

Studio Letters go deeper — into the creative process,
the questions I’m chasing, and the longer reflections
that need more space.

First letter drops early April.

Subscribe now

They danced side to side
        within the boundaries of their hearts.

Fulfilling a playful bet,
        yet exploring their deepest parts.

Every move intentional.
Every gesture welcoming
        as they navigated the floor of their desires.

Jess wrapped her arms around him
        as he slid his hands down her waist.

Rejoicing in the moments,
        enjoying the other.

Both sharing the rhythm
        that their hearts played.

"Can I tell you I love you yet?" Jess said with a coy 
smile.
        "I think you've won this wager."

Evan pulled her closer,
        and she took lead,
                wrapping her fingers through his hair.

No longer just a dance.
No longer a playful bet.

He conceded by nibbling her ear,
        and she reciprocated with a gasp
                as he serenaded a melody of words —

"Jess, I love you."
"Je t'aime, Evan."

✍️ Author’s Note

If Unrequited Confessions was about finding the courage to speak, and All Natural was about what happens after fear finally leaves the room, then A Journey’s End is about what comes when two people stop pretending the game is just a game.

There’s something I find endlessly tender about the way we use playfulness to get closer to the truth. The bet, the dare, the joke that’s only half a joke.

We do it because saying I love you cold, without cover, without something to hide behind, is one of the most vulnerable things a person can do. So we build a little bridge first. We make it a dance. We make it a wager.

This story was written to the sound of All of Me by John Legend, and if you know the song, you already understand what I was reaching for. That particular kind of love that doesn’t ask you to be polished or perfect. That sees the curves and edges, the clumsy moments and the carried-away ones, and says:

“All of that is exactly what I want.”

What drew me to Jess and Evan wasn’t the confession at the end. It was everything that led to it. The intentionality of each movement. The way they both knew, long before any words were spoken, that this had already become something real.

The wager was never really about winning. It was a way of giving each other permission.

I wanted the French at the close, Je t’aime, to feel like Jess meeting him in his own language. Not a translation. An answer. Two people arriving at the same place from different directions, and recognizing each other there.

This is the third story in our March series, and to me it completes something. A beginning, a discovery, and now an arrival.

💭 A Question for You

I’d love to know, have you ever used a bet, a dare, or a little playfulness to say something you weren’t quite ready to say out loud?

Leave a comment

✦

Studio Letters go deeper — into the creative process,
the questions I’m chasing, and the longer reflections
that need more space.

First letter drops early April.

Subscribe now

See the Zine for A Journey’s End on March 23rd, 2026

“Experiencing this life with you is like living at the peak of a mountain. Taking my breath away, and reminding how finite I am and how truly alive we are.”

There’s something that happens at the top of a mountain that doesn’t happen anywhere else.

The wind hits differently up there. The sky feels closer than it should. And for a moment, you become aware, almost uncomfortably of exactly how small you are against all of it.

And somehow, that smallness feels like a gift.

I think that’s what certain people do to us. Not the ones who make us feel grand or invincible, though that has its own sweetness.

But the ones who make us feel real.

Present. Aware of our own edges and heartbeat. The ones whose presence makes the world suddenly, strangely, more vivid.

I remember standing somewhere high once and feeling the particular ache of wanting someone beside me. Not because I needed rescuing from the vastness of it, but because some views ask to be shared.

Some moments feel incomplete when they’re only yours.

That’s the thing about love that takes your breath away. It’s not always the romance of it. Sometimes it’s the weight.

The reminder that you are here, now, in this body, in this life, and so are they. And that the two of you, small and finite as you are, chose to experience it together.

Being finite next to someone you love doesn’t feel like a limitation.

It feels like the whole point.

Maybe aliveness isn’t something you find alone, maybe it’s something that happens in the space between two people, at the peak of something neither of you could have climbed without the other.

✨ In the comments, I'd love to hear your thoughts — Is there someone in your life whose presence makes the world feel more vivid, more real, just by being there?

📖 Behind the Story

We don’t write honestly about physical intimacy very often. We write around it, perform it, or make it cinematic in ways that have very little to do with what it actually feels like to be a beginner with someone you trust.

I wanted to write the version we don’t see enough.

The one with laughter in it. The one where an “ouch” happens and nobody flinches. Where curiosity leads and ego stays out of the room entirely.

That’s All Natural. Not intimacy as performance, but intimacy as trust; the particular kind of ease that only exists when two people have quietly agreed there’s nothing here to get wrong.

I made one decision that shaped everything: I would write around what was happening rather than through it. Not to be coy, but because the emotional truth I was chasing had nothing to do with the act itself.

It had everything to do with what it feels like to be a beginner in front of someone whose opinion of you matters, and to discover that it costs you nothing.

That’s the real vulnerability here — not the physical closeness, but the willingness to not know what you’re doing and stay anyway.

On the Visual Process

The cover is the only panel in full color, warm and close and laughing. It sets the tone before a single word lands: this is not a serious story. It’s a tender one.

From there, the zine moves into black and white, and the choices become deliberate.

The opening panel doesn’t begin with faces. It begins with feet, tangled and unhurried under sheets. Something small and specific rather than something obvious. An entry point that’s intimate without being declarative.

The hand panels carry the story through touch and guidance; one person leading, the other following, both learning the rhythm together.

And then the “ouch” panel. Three frames: the pull, the moment, and Monica smiling after. That set of frames was my favorite to come up with. That smile is everything —it’s the story’s thesis in a single expression.

The imperfection didn’t break anything. It deepened it.

The final slide closes in complete darkness.

We had nothing to fear.

Nothing after it. Just those five words and the space around them.

The most honest kind of intimacy isn’t about knowing what you’re doing; it’s about trusting someone enough to figure it out together.

💭 A Question for You

Have you ever had an imperfect moment with someone that somehow made you feel closer, not further away?

Leave a comment

✦

Studio Letters go deeper — into the creative process,
the questions I’m chasing, and the longer reflections
that need more space.

First letter drops early April.

Subscribe now

Read the Original Flash Fiction Here → All Natural

In delight, we looked at each other,
       one on top of the other.

Time flew between us like the lifetimes 
we've shared.

Our laughter ensued while our curiosity 
on the other took hold.

      There was no pressure to get it right.
       No experience required.

"Yes, like that David,"
       in sync with the rhythm our hearts 
       played.
"I love it just like that."

The desire to give came naturally
as we explored, uncontested, the lands 
we embodied.

Explorers and adventurers of our own design.
Monica's fingers traced along my hair,
guiding the cadence of the lessons.

"Ouch!"
I groaned.

"Sorry, love, I got too carried away."
       She said, enticing and coy.

We laughed along with the experience,
teaching our hearts —

we had nothing to fear.

✍️ Author’s Note

If the last story was about finding the courage to say it — this one is about what comes after.

Unrequited Confessions lived in the held breath, the shallow exhale, the words that cost something to speak.

All Natural lives in what that courage makes possible; a natural progression as the second story this month, after the start of a relationship, maybe. Slight pun intended.

Two people on the other side of fear, curious about each other without a script, without pressure, without anything to prove.

I wanted to write about intimacy without writing about intimacy, to show the glimpses rather than the whole picture. The laughter mid-moment. The “ouch” that doesn’t break anything. The way curiosity, when it carries no weight, becomes its own kind of tenderness.

What drew me to this story was the idea that vulnerability doesn’t always look like a confession. Sometimes it looks like two people deciding, without saying it out loud, that there’s nothing here to get wrong.

That they can be explorers, a little clumsy, a little carried away, and that’s not a flaw in the experience.

That is the experience.

The lesson Monica and David are teaching each other isn’t really about touch. It’s about what happens when fear finally leaves the room.

💭 A Question for You

When was the last time you let yourself be a beginner in front of someone you love?

✦

Studio Letters go deeper — into the creative process,
the questions I’m chasing, and the longer reflections
that need more space.

First letter drops early April.

Subscribe now

See the Zine for All Natural Publishes on March 16th, 2026

Can't you feel that when you look at me that way, I simply melt into you without restraints?

Some looks pass over you, and then there are the ones that land.

The kind that finds something in you that you forgot was there, or maybe never let anyone find before. The kind that makes every wall you’ve carefully built feel, suddenly, like a performance you’re tired of giving.

I’ve spent a long time being very good at composure. Being present in a room without ever really arriving. But there have been maybe two people in my life whose gaze made all of that feel like a lie I was telling myself.

Not because they asked me for anything. But because they saw. Fully. Without flinching.

And being truly seen is both the thing we want most and the thing we’ve spent years learning to outrun.

There’s a surrender in that kind of look that has nothing to do with weakness. It’s more like recognition, something in your chest finally exhaling after years of holding its breath. You don’t lose yourself in it.

You stop pretending you were someone smaller.

That’s what that question is really asking, I think. Can’t you feel it? As if the melting happens to both of you. As if letting go isn’t losing yourself, it’s finally coming back to yourself.

Maybe restraint was never protection.

Maybe it was just the long way around.

And maybe the bravest thing we ever do is let someone look at us that way — and not look away.

✨ In the comments, I'd love to hear your thoughts — Has anyone ever looked at you like that, the kind of look that made you forget everything you'd rehearsed?

📖 Behind the Story

This one is personal.

I’ve carried this feeling before, knowing I liked someone, wanting to say it, and letting fear make the decision for me instead.

The rejection never even happened. I just decided it would, and stayed quiet.

This story was my way of going back to that moment. Not to rewrite it exactly, but to imagine the version of me that was braver.

A third-person point of view, almost like watching yourself from across the room, living the moment you wished you’d had.

And I think that’s why it resonates beyond just my own experience.

Most of us have been there, holding something back not because we don’t feel it, but because saying it out loud makes it real.

Makes the answer real too.

What I’ve learned since then is simpler than I expected: say it. Be open to the outcome without being attached to it.

The courage isn’t in the result — it’s in the honesty.

On the Visual Process

The mood was autumn from the start, my favorite time of year, and a season that already holds that particular mix of warmth and longing before anything is even said.

The cover is the only panel in full color.

It’s the establishing shot, the world as it exists before the confession. Two people on a bench, not sitting close. The distance between them says everything before a single word does.

From there, the story moves between two visual registers.

The comic panels carry the scene, gesture, expression, proximity.

Frame 2 was one of the most deliberate choices.

We don’t see his full face, only his mouth from her point of view as he says, “I’ve always been into you, now more than before.”

Her expression holds that blank, processing moment, not quite a reaction yet, just receiving. And underneath it all, quietly, his hand reaches toward hers.

Not grabbing. Just reaching.

The gesture does what the words can’t quite finish.

Frame 3 shifts to black and white. Just the words, floating

Swallowing hard, moving beyond the uncertainty, beyond his fears.

No scene. Just the internal moment before he keeps going.

Frame 4 returns to her, a split frame catching the shift in her expression as the rest of his confession lands.

There’s warmth breaking through, even a small playfulness in how he says it. And the hands, which were only reaching in Frame 2, are now connecting.

Two hands finding each other.

Frame 5 brings the embrace. The veil of guilt lifting, the warmth rising. Her arms around him before she even knows how to put it into words.

And the final card closes in darkness.

His longing was mutual and never one-sided.

Nothing else needed.

In under 80 words, this story holds an entire scene, movement, expression, and physical progression building quietly from one frame to the next.

That hand reaching in Frame 2, and then landing in Frame 4, is the emotional center of all of it.

A short story. But a beautiful one.

💭 A Question for You

Is there a moment you’ve revisited, not to change it, but to finally understand it?

Read the Original Flash Fiction Here

Shallow breaths echoed
         as he tried to find the words.

"I've always been into you,
now more than before."

Swallowing hard,
         moving beyond the uncertainty,
         beyond his fears,
he continued.

"At times, my ego made it harder to say something,
         while holding onto the idea
                    that one day you would tell me.

That, you would look at me and realize
          I was there
                    in front of you the whole time."

A veil of guilt draped over,
         but a warm feeling aroused inside her.

She embraced him,
          not knowing how to reciprocate best—

that his longing was mutual
        and never one-sided.

See the Illustrated Zine. It will be published on 3/9/2026

Subscribe now

✍️ Author’s Note

I think we've all been in that space, wanting to say what we feel, but afraid of rejection, unsure of ourselves. There are so many moments when we have the opportunity to overcome that fear, yet somehow let it pass.

This story came from that place. And from a quote by Karen Salmansohn that stopped me mid-thought:

"The only way to heal deep wounds is through forgiveness."

There's a particular kind of regret that doesn't live in what we did but lives in what we waited too long to say. I don’t recall where I read the quote, but it resonated with me.

It made me think about the courage it takes to say what's important. Especially in matters of love, and how forgiveness isn't always about someone else. Sometimes it begins with the version of you that waited too long to speak.

No matter how far along you are in life, it's never too late to say what matters. To the people you love. To yourself. And overcoming that fear? That's also a way to forgive yourself and heal, all at the same time.

With this particular story, I decided to take a different approach to formatting. It dawned on me recently that we could stylize some of these stories like spoken poetry.

This was a first attempt, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed figuring out the mechanics of what felt visually right.

I'll be trying new techniques with future stories — How exciting is that!?

💭 A Question for You

I’d love to know if you’ve shared this experience. Has there been something you’ve been holding back, not out of indifference, but because saying it out loud made it too real?

See the Zine Published Zine

Death is the background against which life appears. If it had not existed, we would have never known what life is." — Knausgaard

I used to think meaning was something you found. Chased. Earned.

It took a few losses to understand it differently.

Meaning isn’t something you find. It appears that the way a photograph develops in the dark. The contrast does the work. The shadow gives the light its shape.

Knausgaard is talking about death. But I think what he’s really pointing at is this: we only understand what we’re holding when we can see what we could lose.

I’ve felt that most in the quiet griefs. Not the dramatic ones, though I’ve known those too. The relationship that thinned out slowly, until one day there was nothing left to hold. The version of me I had to let go before I could become whoever this is.

Those endings didn’t just hurt. They showed me the shape of what I’d had.

That’s what death does to life. It doesn’t erase it. It defines it.

The skull in dry earth, poppies pushing through. The skull doesn’t stop the flowers. It’s the reason they’re that red. That’s insistent.

I keep coming back to this: maybe every ending is just the background filling in. Painted darker, slowly, so whatever survives can finally come into focus.

Maybe we don’t understand what life is by living it. Maybe we understand it by surviving the things that remind us it could end.

✨ In the comments, I'd love to hear your thoughts — what ending brought something else into sharper focus for you?