Back to Oui: Lone Star

My favorite season has always been fall — that narrow country between warmth and cold, beautiful but indifferent, full of purpose and stripped of any real surprise. People call it a subtle transition. I've always felt it as something closer to a storm gathering on the horizon of summer's brilliance, grey before it ever announces itself as grey.

My summers in LA were the best I can remember, and not because they were easy — because they were mature, intentional, the first ones that felt like they belonged to the adult I was becoming rather than to nostalgia. The summers before them lived somewhere between memory and myth, golden and unreal, the kind of thing a child archives rather than actually experiences. But those LA summers I can still feel on my skin. Warm. Soothing. Kinetic, like they had a soundtrack built into the air. They came with a new family — friends found away from home, the next best thing to the ones I'd left behind. And none of it happened by accident. It built, season into season, the way anything real has to. Kickbacks. Drives down the 405. The breeze off the PCH. Festivals, late nights that turned into real conversation, music, talent everywhere I looked. It didn't feel like a godless place. It felt like love, wherever I turned. I was in love with being alive.

I remember the night we made it official — a small naming ceremony, half joke and half vow, the kind you only do with people you actually intend to keep. Intention. Connection. Relationship. I made myself a promise that day, the same one I still try to keep: I will be fair. I will be right, and I will be wrong, and I'll survive being either one. I will listen. I will share. I will not be dangerous, and I will let myself be loved, and liked, without flinching from either.

I didn't know yet that a season is still just a season. For a long time after, I mistook its ending for my failing — I felt like a failure, like I'd been handed something rare and let it slip through carelessness or unworthiness. That's where the ache really started, not in the ending itself but in the verdict I kept handing myself about it, almost like the first time I'd ever lost something that mattered, a small warning of what was coming even as I stood inside the best of it. My friends were sharp, witty, talented, beautiful, and cunning in the ways only truly gifted people are. I thought we'd grow old inside that. Build something that lasted. I wanted it forever.

Maybe that was the mistake. Maybe wanting forever is its own kind of ambition, and ambition always comes with a bill. LeBron James lives in LA now too, and if you ask me, his greatest accomplishment was never a ring — it was that he got to walk through this life with his friends beside him the whole way, married the woman he'd loved since before anyone was watching, and built something that kept bearing fruit. No record beats that. No accolade touches it. It's community. It's the version of the American Dream nobody puts on a billboard, and it was the only one I ever actually wanted — to be a star among stars, to have a family that never broke, fruit that never rotted. I learned the hard way that some fruit is forbidden, and some of it rots anyway. Stars look close together from where we stand. They are lightyears apart.

Here's the strange part: you never see a seed unless you're the one who planted it. And somehow, without ever meaning to, I planted the ones that grew into our undoing — not by my own design, but by whatever quieter force always seems to want good things separated before they can finish becoming great. It starts small. A whisper. A rumor with no fingerprints on it. I know what a lie costs now. It doesn't just destroy — it reveals. It tells you exactly how the person delivering it really feels about you, what you made them feel, and what they've decided you deserve for it. I actually believed, foolishly maybe, that someone would want to sit down and talk it through. I can't remember the last real conversation I had with anyone who wanted clarity more than they wanted to be right. I would have given anything to protect that principle with the people I loved — where two or three are gathered, that should be enough to hold a thing together. But a rumor spreads anyway. The idea takes root. The fruit comes in beautiful, and exotic, and sharp enough to burn on the way down.

I've traced my own steps since then, the way I was taught to back home — follow the equation, find where it broke. What I missed wasn't the facts. It was the psychology. What actually matters to someone who feels wronged has nothing to do with who's right. I could have been right every day for a year and it never would have fixed a single thing. I was still trying to learn that lesson. Not everyone else was trying with me.

LA is a city built for stars, and it has no patience for the ones who dim, even for a season. It will let you go the moment you stop shining the way it expects. Maybe that's by design too.

I think I leaned too hard on what those friendships were supposed to hold. If I'm honest, I was ready to become whatever they needed — a handler, a butler, even a jester — because some part of me had tied my own destiny to their approval of it. I wanted them to help cultivate whatever gift I had. That was never the plan, and I still don't fully know why it couldn't have been. I've seen it work for other people. What did I miss?

What I hold onto is this: I never did anything to anyone on purpose. That has to count for something, louder than anything anyone else observed from the outside. I could always account for the offense of others, down to the tee. Intentionality is my golden egg — the one metric I trust to tell me whether I'm still showing up in love the way I mean to. I always left the door open to talk, to reconcile. But I never chased, and I never begged. That discipline is the only thing standing between me and a version of myself I already know too well, the one who slipped into absurdity once before, back when I let people take more than they had any right to. Distance is painful. It's also necessary.

At some point it stopped feeling like reconciliation was even the goal — it started feeling like a competition over who could stay silent the longest, who could land the sharper insult. I was never interested in that game. Being good at something has never meant I needed to keep proving it. I learned that back home too. Apparently I'm still learning it here, in this land none of us are actually from — all of us arrived from somewhere else, married to our own hope of what this place might make us. Most people don't make it all the way through that hope. Most of us end up alone at some point. But alone isn't only a wound. It has its own kind of healing in it. Focus sharpens once the tears stop.

I misplaced my own desire somewhere in the middle of all this, and it took losing people to see it clearly. Someone once told me I wasn't allowed to call myself a victim — a strange thing to hear, because haven't we all been one, at some point, the same way we've all been privileged at some point? I never built an identity around it. But I heard the accusation anyway, from someone I'd known a long time, someone who stopped wanting to hear my voice at all. He just wanted me gone. They all did, eventually — like disappearing was the trend they'd all quietly agreed to try next. All I ever wanted was to be seen. Remembered in a photo, standing with the people I called family. Instead they kept finding reasons to leave the frame.

I don't know the whole lesson yet. I refuse to build a life around the idea that I'm meant to do this alone forever, even if some people seem to need me to believe it so their own story makes sense. I won't let it make me bitter — I think that's the actual trap, the quiet plan working against me the whole time. I have to stay a peaceful man. A loving one. Even while I still haven't figured out what being alone is actually for.

What I've had to relearn since is the difference between failing and finishing, because for a long time I only knew the first word for what happened. Some seasons are built to keep you. Others are only built to change you, and change doesn't need your permission to be finished. Nothing about mine ending meant I'd done it wrong. It meant the season had already done its one job — it made me more intentional, more capable of real love, more willing to choose peace over bitterness. That was never going to be a forever kind of work. It was a becoming kind of work, and becoming, once it's finished, has nowhere left to keep you.

Texas calls itself the Lone Star State, and for a long time I thought that name was just geography. I don't think that anymore. Maybe a lone star was never about being unaccompanied, and maybe it was never about failing either. Maybe it was always about learning to keep burning in the dark, on your own light, long after everyone you expected to orbit with you has drifted back to their own galaxies, finished with what they came to do. I'm still here. Still burning. That might be the only accomplishment that was ever actually mine to keep. But I'm still hopeful to burn with others, to burn with my family and my loved ones into a darkened night sky where all the stars are woven into the most intricate tapestry.