It all began with a tree, a triangle, and a necklace.
It's a crepe myrtle in my backyard. I sit under the canopy when the noise gets to be too much, when the sensory overload takes over. The tree and I have a lot in common, we both carry scars, but it still puts out new flowers every year, and those flowers remind me of my kids. It was here before me, so when I move, I'm leaving it here, because pulling it up would be for me, not for it. It deserves to keep thriving where it already belongs.
I've always loved triangles, and it started with a myth, the Bermuda Triangle, the mystery of things disappearing without explanation. I love mystery, things that are unsolvable, and that love shaped everything else, the hidden coordinates that have to be decoded, messages that don't hand themselves over easily. In the same way, I rarely let anyone else into my world.
The necklace is a compass, and it says "I'd be lost without you." I gave it to her once. Now it's mine, and I use it in almost everything I make, wrapped around a hand, moving through a shot, always somewhere in the frame. There's always a red nail too, black on every other finger, one red. It symbolizes an engagement that happened, and broke. I don't let anyone else touch this necklace, not out of anger, just respect. Some things you don't hand off, even after they're over. And most days, "I'd be lost without you" still says exactly how I feel, because I genuinely don't always know which direction to go in.
This is why everything I make has a triangle on it, and why the coordinates inside it don't hand themselves over easily. Some things shouldn't be a mystery. The people missing. The men with nowhere to go. The generations still carrying what they never asked for. But they are a mystery, to most people, most of the time. A Tree With No Bark exists so you have to look closer. So you have to decode it. So once you do, you can't unsee it, you can't unfeel that tightness in your chest when you realize what you are looking at is more than just a number and a shape on a shirt but, it's a statistic, a demographic, it's an unfortunate truth.