“I surround myself with trees in the hope I might become a  growing thing, too.”

Maybe letting go isn’t all that different to loving you.

I swear my bones can feel it whenever you speak my name.

What a gentle curse: to still want you after all we’ve been.

She spoke with so much hope, the future dancing on her lips like a flame.

Her smile is an open flame and I have a paper heart.

It was always you who felt like water when my whole body was a flame.

Just because the pain is comfortable doesn’t mean you have to wear it.

Some days survival is all the living I can do.

There’s a weight to it, this missing you.

Her heart is heavy and ruined with hope.

Maybe I hold onto pain because I don’t know who I am without it.

I cannot lose you quietly. It will take blood and bone to pull you from my chest.

Even heartbreak can find a way to feel like home.

We built futures I’ll never get to visit. But I still have to watch them crumble.

To hurt is simply an act of remembering. Of holding my skin to the edge in the hope I might feel anything at all.

I have no idea how I made it this far without you.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn’t as good as a white child.

Growing up in Hawaii, the ocean is where I’m most at home. When I’m away from it and landlocked I long for the ocean. There’s something about it, I’m at peace with it.

I grew up on movie sets, getting to see storytelling happen up close.

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers.

I grew up in an artists community in New York, in a building that was government-subsidised for artists. No one made any money, but they made art for the sake of art.

If I’m being honest, I was messing up on every other level in my life growing up – whether it was in school or in my jobs. I was always distracted by my love for music.

I feel like the luckiest child in the world because I got to grow up in Ireland. In summer is when you really grow up. During the year, I would go back to the States, and all year long really couldn’t wait to get back to Ardmore.

You know, I grew up very self-taught.