he wake of my father’s death, I found myself untethered. Grief has a way of dislodging the scaffolding of a life — and in the quiet wreckage, I bought a sailboat. I had no prior sailing experience, no practical reason for such a decision. Just an old vessel docked in San Diego, weathered and waiting, and a voice in my chest that told me to go. I spent months restoring it piece by piece — sanding, wiring, patching, cursing, learning. It was as much an act of resurrection as it was repair.
When the boat was seaworthy enough to float and forgive my inexperience, I left the marina and sailed north — hugging the rugged California coastline with nothing but instinct, the shifting wind, and a stack of nautical charts I barely knew how to read. I nearly died more than once. I got caught in squalls that bent the mast and flooded the cabin. My radio failed. My anchor dragged. I learned about fear in the dark, about trusting your own hands when there’s no one else to call.
But somewhere in the solitude — offshore, alone with the waves — I started writing again. Not songs this time, but poetry. Honest, unfiltered things I jotted in salt-stained notebooks by flashlight or scrawled on the backs of old tide tables. The book I eventually compiled wasn’t something I set out to make. It was something I survived into.
That journey didn’t fix my grief. It didn’t bring clarity in a Hollywood sense. But it gave me motion. And in the motion, I found myself — stripped down, sunburnt, alive.
