Hello!

Thanks for all your kind responses a couple weeks ago in my email about my next book. It's still swirling around in my head, and I'll be taking more steps soon to finally work towards that goal. But for now, I need to work an old muscle that used to be more in shape than it is now. I used to share my writing a lot in the years leading up to my first book, and I just slowly got out of the habit. But I want to start sharing it again, so here goes.

As always, I write for myself. I edit it for you. This bit below is for someone who might feel like they're at the start of a crack in their life, and maybe it feels impossible to heal or fix. This is your reminder that grief can linger in weird ways. There is no straight line to healing.

There's a crack in my windshield. It started one Monday night in April. A small line coming up from the bottom edge, right in the center. It was only a couple inches long.

It felt symbolic as soon as I saw it. Not just a crack in a windshield.

And looking back, that was the week the cracks really started to form. The severing was starting between us.

As the week progressed, that crack in the glass inched upwards. Each day it was a tiny bit longer. I would get in the car, lean up to look closer at it, then wipe my finger through the dusty layer to mark the end. The next day, I would do it again, and see if the crack extended past yesterday's finger mark. Somedays it seemed to stop growing, other days it grew and grew.

Then the severing was official, and the crack kept creeping. As those first few weeks inched by, the crack in the window snaked along with the crack that was breaking open my heart. It felt like me and the windshield were in this together. Like that pane of glass was the only one who understood my pain. Over days and months and weeks, it crept up and over to the right. It literally moved away from me, the driver.

I don't know what caused that crack to form that Monday night, it just appeared. We had parked the car, and there was nothing. Came back out a few hours later, and there it was.

And same with us. I still don't really know what caused the cracks to form. But there they were, loud and clear, blocking my view everywhere I went.

So now here I am, five months out, and the crack has slowed down on the glass. I think it's mostly done, but occasionally it'll look a teeny bit longer than it did a week or a month ago. It's all still there, but I don't notice it as much. I don't measure it anymore. Sometimes I even smile when I look at it.

I've had "replace windshield" on my to-do list for months, and one of these days I'll get around to it. But the symbolism isn't lost on me, and I'm not quite ready to part with the crack just yet. It's oddly comforting. A marker of sorts, frozen in time. Sometimes it catches the reflection of the sun as I'm driving and it glistens. How can something broken also sparkle?

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More writing soon, one step at a time 💛
Kelsey