There was a morning in early autumn when I sat on the back porch and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. The coffee was good. The quiet was right. And yet something in me was restless, the way a story gets when it doesn’t know yet what it needs to become.

I had been carrying a feeling for months — not a plot, not characters, just a feeling. The weight of something unspoken between people who should have said it years ago. The way a room can hold the memory of a conversation that never happened. I kept circling it, taking notes that didn’t add up to anything, until one afternoon I wrote a single line: