First Draft

For twenty years I ran from a story. The one I told myself in the dark. The one I hoped no one else would ever see. I thought survival meant distance. Keeping the worst of me out of the spotlight.

Then the spotlight found me.

In a single news cycle, a private life became something strangers referenced over breakfast. A life stripped to the studs, with people I’d never met picking through the rubble for the parts that would travel.

For a long time after, I couldn’t look at any of it directly. Not the rubble, not the story underneath the rubble, not the man who had lived it. I wrote around it. I painted around it. I stayed sober around it.

I am trying now to look at it directly, and I am trying to do it here, in front of you, one piece at a time.

This is not a book. Not yet. It might become one. Right now it is closer to a room I am walking back into, slowly, with the lights coming up. Some weeks I will get a memory down and know it is true. Some weeks I will write something and find, a week later, that I had it wrong, and I will come back and say so. The whole point is that you see the correction, not just the version that survived the edit.

What I can tell you is this. When there is nothing left to hide, something quiet begins to return. Not peace exactly. Something more like permission. The permission to stand inside your own life, the whole of it, including the parts that don’t reconcile, and to find that the ground holds.

I don’t have the whole story yet. I am not sure anyone ever does. But I am going to try to tell it here, in my own hand, as it comes back to me.

Come with me.

Hunter