“I Woke Up In A Car” by Something Corporate comes through the headphones, and I am suddenly 13 again. I am sitting in the back of a gray van, winding up the roads of North Carolina. I am with my mom, brothers, and her new boyfriend, Bill. It’s some adventure he planned for us as he integrates himself into ours lives. We were spending a weekend at a lodge in the foothills of North Carolina — my first spa day.

It’s funny to say some 20 years later that we didn’t know luxury in this way with my former stepdad. With all the changes in life coming in waves at this point, music was the portal or the one medium that felt like a sturdy wall to lean into. Lyrics have always provided counsel or acted as a balm through all the weird valleys life would take me as a kid.

There are so many times I have a thick desire to sit down and begin recording most of these memories. It’s not that I believe there is an audience waiting for my memoir, but I feel like it would be therapeutic and funny and weird in a good way. In my Notes app lives the beginning paragraph to the non-existent memoir.

I know one day it will happen. I will travel from my home here in Carmel, Indiana to Corpus Christi, Texas to retrace my steps from birth to now. What was and what is. I wish we could all do this, you know? As a way to have some historical capturing on our very being — as a way of making sense of all our parts.

One day, I will trace it all the way through.