Dear Muse,
You find me again—this time near the food court, where the air hums thick with fried sweetness and voices clash like windblown leaves. You have no preference for silence. Instead, you arrive when the world is loud, when the neon lights pulse like heartbeats, when mothers hush babies, and the cashier’s scanner beeps its rhythm. Amidst the noise, I find clarity. You make me see the world through a different lens—the man with two bags of onions, the teenager in black boots, the woman whose hands tell more stories than her face. It’s here, in the chaos, where I lose myself and, paradoxically, find everything.

As a child, I couldn’t grasp the complexities of trauma or why it settled in my young heart like a heavy fog. I just knew I felt out of place, carrying a sadness that words couldn’t capture. The adults around me, though filled with love, were navigating their own struggles, leaving me to wrestle with emotions I couldn’t name. It wasn’t until years later that I began to see the puzzle of our family more clearly—the way each of us carried pieces of resilience and unspoken pain. Through it all, Mama Jean’s typewriter became my silent confidant, the one place I could pour out my tangled thoughts and begin to make sense of my world.