Eventually.
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a writer.
I stole that line.
As far back as I can remember, someone else remembered it first, in a different accent, about a different kind of life. I took the sentence and put my own hands inside it, the way you might put on a father's suit, just because you want to know what it felt like to wear it.
That was the first theft. It would not be the last.
There is a sound I carry from a movie where Cecilia wore that killer green dress. Clank, clank. Metal against metal, over the opening titles, before a single word is spoken. I don't know why it stayed. I only know that when I sit down to write, some part of me is still listening for that sound, waiting to know if what I've written has any weight to it, any clank.
From Kafka I stole permission. Even cows can fly, he seemed to say, and nobody in the story blinks. I needed that. Where I come from, the miraculous was not a genre; it was a Tuesday. Kafka gave me the confidence to write that down without apologizing for it.
From GarcĂa Márquez I stole a way of seeing. A woman walking beneath a brutal Caribbean sun, and it seems, just for a moment, that she is levitating. Or that I grew up without seasons. I only knew how the body felt: hot most days, until the rain seemed to know what day it was, and left in time for Mother's Day. He taught me that the truest thing about a feeling is rarely the feeling itself. It's the impossible image standing by its side, vouching for it.
From Milton Glaser I stole a silhouette. Only later did I learn he had stolen it too, from Marcel Duchamp: a black profile cut against white, a face erasing itself into shadow. Glaser filled the hair with color and called it Dylan. I filled the mind with a door opened onto sky and called it a poster that existed for one graduating night and nowhere else. Best of class, they told me, not knowing they were praising the fourth hand a single silhouette had passed through.
From my mother I stole the smell of mint and burnt sugar. She never wrote a sentence in her life. Her second-grade penmanship survives only in one letter, where she found enough words to carry her across the ocean.
I used to think this made me a thief.
Now I think it made me a son.
Duchamp never knew my name. Glaser never meant to teach me. Kafka gave permission to Márquez, who passed it on without knowing he was passing anything on.
My mother gave me words before she knew what I would do with them.
Somewhere, without ever writing it down as instruction, I will give all of it to my children, and they won't know they're holding it either until they've already made it theirs.
So here is what I want them to know, whenever they find this.
Nothing in me was built alone. The writer, the coach, the friend, the father, the son—all of it assembled from borrowed thoughts and without permission.
Take freely, the way I took.
Steal the cadence, the sound, the permission, the image. Borrow the courage, the smell of mint and burnt sugar, the words that carried your grandmother across an ocean. Make them yours the way I made them mine.
That is not theft.
That is how anyone becomes someone.
Eventually.
Season 2. Letter 07. A letter whenever truth asks for it, when the repair demands it. When love insists. If you're curious about the coaching work → sundaymorning.coach
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