Let me read this to you…
In my effort to promote good writing, good writing habits, and ignore the intrusion of AI, sharing my collaboration with my editor SarahBelle Selig seems just plain right.
21AUG2026
Dear Charlotte,
I cried yesterday. Tears welled in my lower lids. My throat closed. A silent, existential cry.
There are three, was four, but three people to whom I could croak words of the horror I yet carry, the pain I occasionally feel. I cried listening to the story of a sixteen-year-old’s death at the hands of stupidity and the utter violence of machinery. She lived three towns north of me. She lived in a town in this state with the exact name of the town in the neighboring state where I graduated high school.
I suppressed the first set of tears when my physical therapist told me the story while snug in our private confessional of a Thursday afternoon appointment. Her building was empty. The first cop on scene later called his boss (my therapist’s husband) for a post-crisis debrief. The men spoke quietly. I cried because horror travels through the invisible threads of human life.
I listened to my friend tell her story of her husband’s story of his trooper’s story. A sound in a deeply quiet forest connected that death to my deeply quiet forest miles distant. Later, I was reminded of a 120-year-old chair once positioned in my office for peer counseling of my own crew, a chair now long retired to a sunny corner for reading.
During the pandemic, your mother returned to this place she has often called home. We walked “the block” (a six-mile hilly amble along dirt and paved roads, mostly dirt, that form a triangle). As we walked, I prattled on about the medical status, medications, trauma, deaths, and family trees associated with each property we passed. Because that is how I experience much of my human connection. The day reminds me that we are but one.
The great religions strive to teach us this, but too often they lose the truth. One of my father’s best jokes told child me of a religious man who approached a dirty-water dog vendor on the street, asking: “Please make me one with everything.”
The internet, fiction, and leaders seek strife and differentiation where unnecessary. One Love, Three Little Birds. One blood. And to paraphrase my old friends and neighbors, HD Thoreau and RW Emerson, one cannot harm people without harming oneself. They may have been writing of time, or nature, or both. I am certain, at the core, that the philosopher of squirrels would have danced a Reggae beat with me when hearing a version of that same truth.
I believe I croaked a knowing, “Yes,” to a fellow trained medical practitioner, and friend. As she pushed my right wrist into what should be a natural position, she whispered a family name. Even in the whisper, her voice diminished to silence. I said, “Yes.” Then the first pair of tears took station on my lower lids. “She was one of mine, yes.”
Charlotte, I don’t even know if I can continue my narrative. Most of what I will tell you, my child, can be found in public records. A teen died a violent, horrible death in the teeth of a machine on a quiet forested mountain surrounded by her friends. I should not have been there, but for a blizzard and a sad emergency in my own town. Two of us heard the screaming pleas of overwhelmed and under-trained first responders asking for help and equipment over the regional radio system. We made the southward turn toward trouble instead of home.
Unseen to civilian eyes, responders can misdirect grief, anger, frustration, and fear toward each other. Two fire chiefs turned on each other and the two medics who came to help with a truck full of kit. Teenagers screamed in rage, blaming all of the gods, the demons, and the rescuers near. Hard to know if the undropped tear was for the trauma induced by the variety of well-intentioned rescuers, or the tragic death of a teen, or the blend of it all. Doesn’t matter, does it? Those are inseparable. We, humans, can be dreadful, mean, petty, and unforgivable in the face of trauma, amplifying the underlying mess.
I did not ask, “How did you know?” as my therapist bent my wrist to its rather limited extent of twenty degrees or so. Instead, I said, “It got worse. I attended the twinned deaths of her father and uncle.”
With gentle pressure on my palm, pushing my wrist professionally, my therapist stated that another uncle committed suicide, a scene she knew all too well. As I recounted my facts, she told me the name of an unknown person I met in the forest that day. We both knew the stories. They bled at our feet.
I forbade myself from telling this tangle of stories because, like stars in our night sky, some dots when placed just so create a landmark. A cluster of six (or seven) stars has been known as subaru, the seven sisters, the Pleiades, and other names globally. If I hint at these facts on paper, it takes little to align them to a known constellation. I tell myself my silence protects that family. I tell myself my silence protects my community. I tell myself my silence protects me from the judgment of others, for my failures and inability to manage these scenes better. I was not in charge, just an experienced EMT and medic who’s been walking, or running, toward trouble since 1983.
Stoicism required that during a professional meeting at a local business, I spent an hour not looking at a large, framed photograph of a dead teenager sitting on the credenza directly behind my host. My host, by placing this photo there, stated: “I am connected to that death.” And yet, I saw only reflections of my version of that night. I could not ask for the photo to be shifted or turned. Instead, my eyes flicked left, right, up, down with the guilt of a suspect being questioned by police.
The paradox of the widespread loneliness crisis is that we each stare into a human-manifested suite of technology we have mislabeled as The Web. I question which is worse: the sense of modern digital isolation or the profound acknowledgement that we humans are but one. We, naturally, form a web. What we do unto ourselves affects all. I walked the valley of death learning that the valley is neither remote, nor hidden, but ever present. It isn’t just the death that pains me but the human behavior in the teeth of tragedy.
I am a node in a mycelial-like species. Invisible and fragile hyphae communicate between us all. I am one. Silent tears return unbidden.
The End
Hey, this is I. M. Aiken, in late August 2026. My third novel drops in late September. Captain Henry: 2 ½ Insurrections, 2 Wars, 1 ¼ Centuries, and a Story of Love has been described as a, “A contemporary perspective of American warfare that reminds readers of Hellers’ Catch 22 and Hooker’s MASH.” The stories are based on my first-hand journals from Iraq in 2006 and Reconstruction-era archives about my great grandfather, who enlisted as an underaged private in 1870 then later lead troops in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, providing infantry support to the Rough Riders, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Buffalo Soldiers. You’ll find it or can order it at any bookstore and/or listen to me read it to you as an audiobook available at all of the outlets: Libro.fm, Barnes & Noble Audio, Libby, and Audible.
Take care of each other. Few understand. My young friend (a woman I help raise) informed me this week that as she transports vets in her ambulance, they are universally informing her that therapists have asked them to open up and tell their stories, only to end the session early saying: please stop, you are traumatizing me, you’ll need to find a different therapist. This now forty-year-old medic was a young EMT on that stormy night above.
One love.