Amen. Aśe. And All That Shit.

I recorded the message in my apartment, reading from my phone. I had written the whole thing out first because the last time we talked, I got so focused on being clear that I got cold. I did not want to do that again. The recording was six minutes. I restarted it. When I finally got through the whole thing, I still did not send it. She was already having a hard day. Some of that was my fault. So I...

She wasn’t in a hurry. That’s the part I keep coming back to. She took the long way. Traced the collarbone with one finger like she had all night, because she did. Followed it down slow, palm flat against my chest to feel what it was doing under there. No map, no destination, just attention. That was the thing that undid me. Attention, warm and unbothered, moving over a body I was raised to think...

I was on the phone late at night, caking, when I found more than 70 of my songs sitting in two music datasets available to AI developers. That was not what the call was about. I was not researching artificial intelligence. I was not thinking about copyright law. I had come across an article in The Atlantic about millions of songs cataloged in massive music datasets. There was a search bar. So I ty...

It was my birthday. She made me dinner. That was the gift. Not a gift and dinner. The dinner was the gift. That was the whole ledger for the day. She was out for most of it, singing with her friends, which was not unusual. I sat with that the way I sat with most things back then, which is to say I noticed it and filed it under things I didn’t get to have feelings about. I was a grown man. I had a...

My mother stood in front of a room of kids who were in trouble. Real trouble. The kind that got you sent to Boys Town. She stood in front of them and pointed at me. I was six or seven. Not there for anything I did. There because I was her son, and she was a family teacher, and somebody had to play the kid the program worked on. Six years old and already a teaching tool. "Watch," she said. Then she...

There is a box at my door when I get home. There is almost always a box at my door when I get home. It’s a lamp today. It was a pan yesterday. The day before that, it was a set of sheets from a woman two states over. Someone I’ve never met. Some stranger who sent me that box because I said out loud, in a video, that I had been sleeping on the floor in Queens. Someone else saw the same video and se...

Author’s note: This one touches family, faith, sex, and the old machinery of abandonment. I am not writing it to make anybody the villain. I am writing it because sometimes the story that makes us look good is still hiding the wound. The train is packed and I am holding the pole like everybody else, pretending I am fine. I am not fine. A few days ago a woman called me a hoe and meant it. Here is w...

Before this is an essay, it is an apology. That matters. Because it is very easy to make language beautiful around something you should have simply owned. It is easy to turn harm into reflection before you have sat in the plainness of it. So let me start there. I said something I should not have said. I spoke about someone’s private information in a conversation where I was trying to defend myself...

Ask me how I’m doing. Go ahead. I’ll show you a magic trick. “I’m good.” See that? Didn’t even think about it. The words left my mouth before my brain got a vote. I could be three days behind on sleep, two weeks behind on grief, and one missed call away from falling apart, and I will still hit you with “I’m good” like it’s a reflex. Because it is. I been training for that answer my whole life. Let...

The dryers in New York tried to kill me. I’m not being dramatic. First load of laundry in the new apartment. I set the timer like I’m still in Omaha, like me and the machine got an understanding. We did not have an understanding. I came back and my clothes were hot enough to fry an egg on. Damn near took the skin off my hands pulling them out. The dryers out here are a different breed. Everything...

Content note: childhood sexual violation, silence, survival. Okwu does not usually show up when I am angry. Anger is too easy. He shows up when I feel erased. When somebody tells a story about me that makes me smaller than I am. When my name moves through a room I am not in. When somebody makes a decision, places my shadow behind it, and lets the rumor travel until I start sounding controlling. Cr...

Author’s note: This essay is about hell, but not really. It is about what happens when knowledge becomes armor. We were drinking frozen margaritas. She had invited her friend over, so it was two of them and one of me. Cold glasses sweating on the table. Something easy playing. The kind of night that does not announce what it is about to be. I had been in the city about a week. I knew almost nobody...

I wrote a short version of this in May, before I understood it. A few field notes , just me catching the reflexes as they fired. This is the long version. The one where I went looking for why. I thought leaving would make me free faster. That was the first thing I got wrong. I thought once the beliefs came apart, the version of me built around them would come apart too. Read the books, trace the h...

She never asked me to be her nigga. That fact should clear me. It doesn’t. Because I knew there was a debt forming anyway. I could feel it gathering in the room, in the silence after certain conversations, in the way she waited for me to name something I kept refusing to name. I knew the arrangement had weight. I knew my presence was being counted. I knew my absence was being counted too. And I ke...

I landed in New York with six suitcases and a job I didn’t have a title for. My brother needed help. His kids needed somebody in the apartment when he wasn’t. I’m 38. The job is nanny. Zeke is three. Azzy is eight. They don’t know I just moved here. They don’t know I left a city, a relationship, an apartment, and a friend group I was still tryna figure out how to leave. They know I’m uncle. That’s...

Sometimes chemistry is not love. Sometimes it is your body recognizing a familiar kind of chaos and calling it fate. In this episode, Josh breaks down the difference between passion and panic, intimacy and intensity, desire and emotional surveillance. He explores how inconsistent affection can make longing feel sacred, how anxiety can disguise itself as connection, and why being wanted is not the...

Author’s note: This essay discusses power, consent, kink, religion, masculinity, and emotional responsibility. Details have been blurred to protect privacy. The point is not exposure. The point is what power reveals. The first thing I usually noticed was how fast somebody said yes. Not the outfit. Not the room. Not the fantasy they carried in with them like a lit match. The yes. Sometimes it came...

I’m moving to New York in a few days, and the wild part is the logistics are not even what’s bothering me most. The logistics are loud. Don’t get me wrong. Boxes everywhere. Bills. The lease. The car. The last-minute math. Everything I still have to handle by Tuesday. The little piles around my apartment looking at me like, “So what’s the plan, genius?” That part is stressful. But that ain’t the t...

Omaha knew me before I knew myself. That’s the strange thing about leaving a place where your whole life happened in public. People remember the versions of you you’ve already outgrown. Sometimes they remember the versions you’re still trying to forgive. I wrote about leaving for New York in two weeks, public reinvention, community memory, masculinity, faith, being witnessed, and those stables nex...