Note from the Loft

The Language of the Unbroken — October 10

Sometimes I feel like the world’s most colossal idiot.

Like when I’m at the register at Trader Joe’s pretending to be absorbed in the list of checked-out items because small talk is too hard.

Or when I’m at the VA clinic and the nurse asks what my plans are for the weekend.

I never have an easy answer. I don’t know how to be breezy or casual.

There’s a whole dialect I never learned—the language of the Unbroken.

People who talk about family and friends like those are things everybody has.

People who speak without flinching, who don’t measure every sentence against the risk of being misunderstood or dismissed.

As a kid, I was always being passed over because no one could hear me.

Trapped in silence, I went unseen—even when I knew the answer, even when I managed to form the words.

And now, in my forties, I still don’t know how to talk like a person who takes safety for granted.

But writing has its own language.

It’s how I talk back to the silence, how I remind myself that being seen isn’t the same as being exposed.

It’s how I remember that survival isn’t about pretending to be unbroken—it’s about making meaning out of the cracks.

From the loft, where the fan hums and the silence listens,

Ashley

“I used to believe writing was shouting into a void. You made the trench coat darker, the rain louder, the femme fatale sharper, just to see if the echo would return. It never did. So I kept writing, kept sending signals. A man chasing ghosts in alleys, a detective too angry to name his hunger. Every book was a flare fired into the night. Then one day, a girl walked into my life and said her name was Zoe Mackenzie. My daughter. The signal I had been waiting for.”

—Jeff Griffin, protagonist in The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story