Illustrated by: Pedro Amaral

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A Penny for Your Thoughts

Who was the first person you stopped hiding from?

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Illustrated by: Pedro Amaral

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A Penny for Your Thoughts

Has anyone ever been the one place things stopped falling apart for you?

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Illustrated by: Pedro Amaral

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I am never afraid to share the part of me I keep to myself with you. There is a room in me I keep closed to most people.

With you, the door is already open. I am still learning to let more in, to feel it fully, to hand more of myself over.

You and I are kindred. I will always be there for you, and I know you will always be there for me. I think we’ve evolved and come full circle in many ways.

We began as one thing and became another, and the becoming led us back to where we started, only truer.

Therefore, I love you. I trust you. I hear you. I feel you. I see you.

tqm, have a great night. 🌙

✦

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Has anyone ever said aloud something your heart already knew, and somehow it still knocked the breath out of you?

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Illustrated by: Pedro Amaral

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P.S

This is another one of my favorites.

It’s about a teacher having one of those days where you’re running on empty.

It was inspired by Teacher Appreciation Week, when I found myself thinking about my most memorable teachers.

As a kid, you never notice how complicated life can be.

You never see what it takes for someone to show up every day.

I wanted to capture a bit of that exhaustion. The kind where you walk into a room and forget what you came in for.

Ms. Cindy’s life feels that way, kind of upside down, with a never-ending next problem.

The whole story is built around the drawing from her class. It interrupts how she’s feeling.

It may not fix what’s going on outside the classroom. But for a moment, she’s the one being held instead of the one holding.

Sometimes small joys are just what we need to keep going.

Not because they solve the problem, but because they remind us why we keep showing up for it.

I never explain what’s actually wrong in her life. It’s a fill-in-the-blank.

It could be anyone’s day, anyone’s week: the tired teacher, the worn-out parent, the person giving more than they have left.

Not just hers.

✦

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Have you ever felt like you were running on empty, only to be fulfilled by the simplest of things?

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Illustrated by: Pedro Amaral

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Behind the Story

Pouring was one of my first stories inspired by Anson Seabra’s “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring.” One of my initial attempts at flash fiction.

Though it doesn’t feel as complete as other stories, I was content with the resolution: “I’m a mess.”

It can read as defeat, but it’s also acknowledgment. There is power in that, and it is in that acknowledgment that change is possible.

The rain is a shared feeling of depression, driven by “fill in the blank.” The end of a relationship, a breakup, or maybe something worse.

Whatever drives the anxiety, and the what-if, whatever holds your mind hostage. It pours onto your own storm.

The memories don’t fade; sometimes they fall on you. That can go two ways; it can cleanse or drown you.

There is no true shelter from that kind of weather.

So she stays in the bed. Soaked, stormy-eyed, and hands at her own throat. She doesn’t run from it; she lies with it, and feels it all.

Even if it isn’t a happy ending, it can still be beautiful.

✦

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Have you ever said "I'm a mess" out loud and felt lighter afterward?

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A Question for You

Who was standing next to you the first time you let yourself be fully seen?

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A Question for You

Has someone ever changed you so quietly that you still carry the parts of yourself that bloomed because of them?

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A Question for You

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

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A Question for You

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

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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📖 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?

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📖 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

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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.

💭 A Question for You

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

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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."

💭 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?

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