Late Morning, Key West

It’s late morning and I’m sitting on the balcony of our hotel, the ocean stretched out in front of me like it has nowhere else to be. The light is sharp. The air is already thick. Everything feels startlingly clear.

Clarity is still new to me. I notice it the way you notice a muscle you didn’t know you had — with relief, and a little suspicion.

We’re going to the Hemingway Museum today. Part of it feels like obligation, a quiet nod to the English major I once was. The part of me that believes you’re supposed to honor the lineage that shaped you. But there’s something else too — a connection I didn’t have before. That of being a drunk.

I’m five months sober now, which means I’m standing on an edge Hemingway never got to see from this side.

He’s everywhere in Key West — not as a man, but as a posture. I see him in business meetings held barefoot near the water, where men talk about capital gains as if the ocean isn’t right there, insisting on being noticed. I see him at restaurants where couples celebrate years of marriage, yet the man still speaks like he’s auditioning and the woman answers like she already knows the ending. I see him at beach bars, where someone steps in from the sun and salt and says, This is the life, as if it just arrived and won’t quietly leave again by morning.

Hemingway didn’t drift into fame. He collided with it — and then spent the rest of his life trying to outrun the version of himself the world applauded.

He wanted greatness.

He earned it.

And then he had to live inside it.

Fame didn’t undo him because it was shallow. It undid him because it was loud. It hardened what needed to stay permeable. It turned a listening man into a symbol. It demanded certainty from someone whose power came from staying close to doubt, fear, beauty, and brutality — all at once.

I have to believe Hemingway was connected to the universe. You don’t write like that without listening deeply. You don’t see people so clearly unless you’re paying attention in ways most people avoid.

That connection is why he’s necessary to writers.

And it’s also why he warns us.

Because connection without protection becomes exposure.

And exposure, over time, becomes erasure.

From this balcony, I can see how many people arrive here late in life, finally noticing the vastness they’ve been skirting for decades. They stand ankle-deep in it, drink in hand, declaring they’ve figured something out at last.

Hemingway wasn’t immune to that impulse.

He was just better at naming it.

And maybe that’s the difference.

I don’t want the fame. I want the seeing. I want to sit quietly inside ordinary moments — ambition, marriage, exhaustion, pretending — and translate what hums beneath them. I want my writing to connect with the universe through my eyes, my awkwardness, my particular way of noticing.

We’ll go to the museum later today. I’ll walk through the rooms. I’ll look at the desk. I’ll pay my respects.

But I’ll do it knowing something he never did — that clarity comes after you stop numbing yourself to it.

And that it’s enough.