I started writing poetry in the bathtub, which was inconvenient for my parents but

Then in 2015, I found an old typewriter in a box. Blah blah blah, I became an insufferable instapoet. I read good books. I formed life long friendships.

There was electricity in the air back then, as it was all beginning, everyone could feel the potential energy churning all around us just waiting to be focused. A whole subculture of virtual bards swelled up.

By 2017, I barely recognized my own voice. I was writing daily, cranking out "poems" like factory smoke—recycled themes dressed in new metaphors, just enough sheen to catch a scroll. It was an existential realization.

-- supernova --

I deleted my social media, unplugged my phone, and went feral into the white space of my days, where my soul could finally reboot without Wi-Fi. I got addicted to the negative space between being and doing—the silence that hums like a refrigerator full of meaning.

It was during this time that I found *Vertigo.* My first actual, capital-M “Moment” with the Muse— She was everywhere: sunlight, street noise, earbuds—all streaming love and longing in every beat and blink. I followed her around the world.

After that, I took a break and built an NGO to fix the internet’s report card—to rewire the world’s learning economy so education stops behaving like a subscription service and starts acting like a birthright.

Then Gabriel and I took a trip to Joshua Tree, and while the events of this trip could never be distilled meaningfully into words, the wind blew, and we were present to hear it. We looked deep into the desert mirror, and it cooked our faces blue. We returned from the desert with a mission to write the mirror, to capture an accurate picture for the lost generation for the better bureau of anti-loneliness.

And maybe that’s all poetry ever was—a census of the invisible, a field report from the war between presence and distraction. We didn’t return with enlightenment or followers, just sunburns and notebooks and the faint conviction that the point of art wasn’t to be seen but to see. To stop the scroll, even for a heartbeat. To remind whoever was still listening that loneliness was never the sickness—it was the signal. A flare shot from one consciousness to another across the dark gulf of the feed, saying:

"I’m still here. Are you?"

O'Found‍