Newsletter!

Vol. 1 Issue 14 • August 2026

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The Word I Didn’t Know I Needed

There is a word in John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that stopped me cold the first time I read it.

Anemoia.

Nostalgia for a time or place you have never known.

A longing for something that was never yours. A life you didn’t live. A road you didn’t take. A version of yourself that might have existed somewhere just beyond the thin, crooked line of everything that actually happened.

I didn’t set out to write a book about anemoia. I set out to drive. In the spring of 2023, I pointed my Bronco west and kept going. Louisiana to Texas. Texas to New Mexico. New Mexico to Arizona. Arizona to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

I had a car, a loose itinerary, and an ache I couldn’t quite name. I only knew I needed to leave. There are moments when staying becomes its own kind of surrender. When the life you’ve built begins to feel less like a home and more like a room you have forgotten how to leave.

So I left.

I drove toward a horizon I had never seen, toward landscapes that had no reason to mean anything to me. And somehow, they did.

Standing at the Grand Canyon, I looked into that impossible wound in the earth and felt something inside me go quiet. It was so vast that language seemed almost insulting. The canyon didn’t care about my plans, my regrets, my unfinished business, or the things I had spent years believing were important.

It had been there before me. It would be there after me. And for a few minutes, that was enough. That feeling followed me. Eventually, I learned its name.

Anemoia.

It wears different faces depending on the landscape. In the cypress-dark bayous of Louisiana, it feels like grief for a slower world that hasn’t entirely disappeared yet. A world still hiding in back roads, old houses, muddy water, rusted signs, and places where nobody seems to be in a hurry to become anything else.

On the high desert plains of New Mexico, it feels like recognition. Not I’ve been here before. Something stranger. I should have been here before. The mountains seemed familiar in a way I couldn’t explain. The empty roads. The weathered buildings. The enormous sky. The silence. As though some abandoned version of me had been living there all along, waiting for me to finally show up. And at the Grand Canyon, it became humility. The kind that doesn’t hurt. The kind that strips you down.

You stand at the edge of something millions of years old and realize how little of your life is actually permanent. How much of what consumes you will disappear without leaving a mark. How small you are. And, strangely, how freeing that can be. I wrote about all of it. Essays, mostly. Poems, too, because some things refuse to be contained in paragraphs. Some feelings arrive jagged and unfinished and don’t want to be explained.

The light moving across the Sangre de Cristos at six in the morning. A twenty-minute conversation with a stranger on a trail above Flagstaff that somehow felt more honest than conversations I’d had with people I’d known for years.

The silence of a dispersed campsite after the fire has burned down to coals, when the darkness seems to stretch forever and you realize there isn’t another person for miles. The lonely beauty of a road that keeps going long after the reasons for taking it have fallen away. There are things you only hear when you finally get far enough away from everyone else.

Anemoia: A Collection is not a travel guide.

It won’t tell you the best routes, the cheapest campgrounds, or what gear you need. It is something quieter. And, I think, something more honest. It is a record of what happens when you stop treating travel as escape and start allowing it to become a conversation with yourself. When you let the road ask the questions you’ve been avoiding. When you arrive somewhere you’ve never been and feel, inexplicably, that you’ve come home to something you lost before you ever knew you had it.

I think a lot of us carry anemoia without knowing its name. We feel it when we hear an old song and mourn a decade we never lived. When we walk through a town we’ve never seen and feel an irrational sadness for the people who once lived there. When we look at an old photograph of strangers and wonder what it would have been like to belong to their world. When we imagine another life and feel, for just a moment, that it was supposed to be ours. Maybe that’s why the word stopped me. Because I’ve spent a lot of my life looking backward at roads I never took while simultaneously trying to convince myself I was moving forward.

Maybe the ache isn’t always regret. Maybe sometimes it is recognition. Maybe there are places we haven’t been yet that are already waiting inside us. And maybe the road doesn’t always take us somewhere new. Maybe, sometimes, it takes us back to the person we were before we became so good at pretending we didn’t want anything more.

This book is for those moments.

For the restless.

For the wanderers.

For anyone who has ever stood somewhere unfamiliar and felt, inexplicably, that they had been missing it their entire life. For anyone who has looked at the life they are living and wondered about the life just beyond it. For anyone who has ever needed to leave without knowing exactly what they were running toward.

I didn’t know I needed a word for that feeling. Then I found one.

Anemoia.

And once I had a name for it, I could finally begin to write about it. Anemoia: A Collection is available October 1st on Amazon in paperback and ebook. If you read it, I would be grateful to know what it stirred in you.

Because maybe that is what writing is really for—not telling someone what to feel, but handing them a small piece of your own ache and discovering that, somewhere along the way, it became theirs too.

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