Not exactly journals about them. Although they are absolutely all about them. But much more like a record of their childhood from where I sit.

They start with how excited I am that they exist.

The milestones we both accomplished.

The milestones they accomplished.

The things they said.

The things I notice about them.

The things that made them laugh.

The things they worried about.

The people they loved.

The people who loved them.

The small moments they probably never realized I was watching.

I started because I know how unreliable memory can be. At least mine certainly is.

I can remember some random Tuesday from twenty years ago in perfect detail (or at least the details I took with me) then forget something everyone else insists was important.

My kids will probably do the same.

They’ll grow up with their own versions of these years: their own memories of family trips, holidays, school, friendships, bad moods, inside jokes, hotel rooms, long car rides, and the ordinary days that become the ones I miss the most.

And I love that!

I don’t want to give them the definitive version of their childhood.

I’m not trying to say, “This is what happened.”

I want to offer another angle. The angle of the woman who has been there from before the beginning and loves them unconditionally.

They will have their version and I might have included my version and what it looked like from where I was sitting.

This is what I noticed.

This is who I witnessed you being while you were busy being a kid.

That matters so much, especially now that they’re getting older.

AND, we reference them when my husband and I, or the kids themselves, have a question about something like what day it was when they took their first step, when they got their first haircut, the name of their best friend from preschool.

One of the incredible gifts of returning to the same places year after year is that time becomes visible in a very measurable way.

The beach is still the beach.

The hotel still looks mostly the same.

The restaurants we like are still there.

But the child in the picture has changed so much.

The little kid who once needed my hand to cross the street is now running ahead and not looking back to make sure I’m following.

The kid who used to fall asleep in the car after dinner is now the one choosing the restaurant.

Same place. Different person.

Because the background hasn’t changed much, you really notice that person changing even more.

And that is part of why I write things down.

Not because I’m afraid of forgetting everything, but because I know I’ll forget some of the things I absolutely want to remember.

I’ll remember the trip, but maybe not the really funny thing they said at breakfast.

I’ll remember their age, but maybe not the way they pronounced a word. Ohhhh, I’ve written ALL of those down and there are some that just became the new word.

I’ll remember that they had a hard year, but maybe not the tiny victory that mattered so much at the time.

So I write it down and have been doing some version of this for most of my adult life.

Long before Living With Caution Cones became a novel, it was a pile of handwritten memories on the backs of pages from a failed print job.

I wasn’t journaling exactly.

I was writing down stories I didn’t want to lose.

Things people said.

Ridiculous nights.

Moments that felt important, even when I couldn’t have explained why then.

Those pages eventually became the heart of a novel.

The journals I keep for my children are different.

I have no intention of turning them into anything.

They belong to them.

But the instinct behind both is probably the same:

I don’t trust time to keep the details for me.

Photos are wonderful. I absolutely love photos!

A photo of our son doubled over laughing with our daughter in the background smiling from ear to ear is priceless to me.

But a page in their journal will tell them they spent twenty minutes trying not to laugh because of whatever reason.

A picture might show everyone standing on a beach. But their journal can remind them that somebody was mad, somebody was freezing, and five minutes later everyone was laughing after we jumped in the ocean and dad got pummeled by a wave.

The photo preserves the scene.

The writing preserves the feeling.

I think that is what I’ve always been trying to save.

Not facts. Certainly not the facts…

The feeling.

The feeling of an age.

The way somebody laughed.

The way a room felt when everyone was there.

The things that seemed ordinary at the time and became important later.

I think about this more now because our kids remember trips differently than I do.

They remember moments I barely noticed.

They forget things I thought were enormous.

And I know that will only continue as the years go by and they spend more and more days creating memories I’m not a part of at all.

The journals aren’t there to correct them. They are simply there as another point of view.

That is one of the things I love about writing things down for them.

There is something meaningful about being able to look back and say:

This is what I saw.

This is what I noticed.

This is what I loved.

And this is what it felt like from where I was sitting.

1. You have a thought.

2. You make sense of it.

3. You organize it in your head.

4. THEN, when you know what you’re trying to say, you write it down.

That is completely backwards.

Sometimes I write a sentence and then stare at it like:

Well. Where the hell did that come from?

And then I have to figure out why I wrote it.

Yesterday I wrote this in a Note:

Writing has made me realize how often I only fully understand something AFTER I try to put it into words.

The sentence comes first and understanding why comes later.

And almost immediately I realized so many of you do the same thing.

We write something before we completely understand what we meant by it.

Living With Caution Cones started as handwritten pages on leftover paper from a client project.

I wasn’t sitting there thinking I was exploring friendship or found family or the weird years when adulthood is technically underway but everyone is still figuring it out as they go.

I definitely wasn’t thinking about what those friendships might mean to me decades later.

I was just writing things down.

People. Conversations. Ridiculous nights. Little moments I didn’t want to lose. Feelings I could not explain very well so I put them on paper.

Those pages followed me through multiple moves in the safety of a file folder in a plastic bin.

I thought I had simply kept an old story, but in hindsight, I had kept evidence of what mattered to me before I really understood why it mattered.

When I finally pulled those pages back out all these years later and started turning them into fiction, I could see things the younger version of me could not have ever seen.

She thought she was writing about what was happening.

But now I can definitively say that she was actually writing about what mattered to her in those moments.

There is a BIG difference and I continue noticing that difference now.

Since I started writing here a few months ago, I will sit down thinking I am writing about one thing and somewhere along the way something else shows up.

It’s the thing underneath the thing and sometimes I don’t recognize it until I read it back.

And that right there might be the part of writing I love most.

I do not love a polished sentence.

It’s the discovery that I love... the moment when we, as writers, realize we have written our way into understanding something we did not know we knew.

I love THAT!

We put so much pressure on ourselves to understand things immediately.

Something happens and we want to know:

How do I feel about this?

What does it mean?

Was it good?

Was it bad?

What am I supposed to learn?

What happens next?

Most of the time we have absolutely no idea and I am becoming much more comfortable with that in my writing (NOT my actual life unfortunately).

But in our writing AND our lives, understanding is not always supposed to happen while we are standing in the middle of something.

Sometimes we need distance (like my husband and daughter).

Sometimes we need to tell the story more than once (like my son).

Sometimes we need to get something wrong first (this is sadly me and I apologize each and every time).

And sometimes we need to write one sentence that feels true and then spend a while figuring out why it feels that way.

That is also why old writing can be so strange to revisit.

An old journal or something you wrote in your twenties.

You read it and suddenly there is this younger version of you trying very hard to tell you something and she did not have the vocabulary for it or may not even have known what she was trying to say.

But the clues are there for you to decipher in the story she kept retelling.

Or something she could not stop talking about.

Or someone she kept writing about.

A dream she mentioned, dismissed, and then somehow mentioned again later.

We leave breadcrumbs for ourselves all over the place.

Writing just happens to preserve those breadcrumbs.

Which makes me wonder what I am writing now that I do not understand yet.

That thought fascinates me because if I can look backward and find meaning in things I did not fully understand when I wrote them, I have to assume I am doing the same thing right now.

There is certainly a sentence somewhere in what I have written this year that I will read at sixty and think:

Ohhhhhhh…

That is what you were trying to tell me.

I hope that’s true becasue it takes some of the pressure off.

We do not need every experience to arrive with the lesson already neatly attached like a childhood fable.

We do not need to know exactly what this particular chapter is about while we are still living it.

We can pay attention.

We can write it down.

We can leave ourselves clues.

Maybe the understanding will catch up later, but the sentence can come first.

I have tried to dumb this down. I have tried to alter my own writing so it doesn’t scan as AI. I have changed sentence structure, broken patterns, added messiness, and second-guessed phrases I would normally leave alone.

It comes back the same every time.

Apparently, the way I naturally write is too patterned. Too grammatically correct. Too clean. Not riddled with enough nonsense to register as sufficiently “human.”

I’m over it.

I like to write the way I like to write.

I like to read writing that sounds this way too.

Yes, I use AI as a sounding board sometimes. It helps me think through ideas, organize thoughts, and push on something until I know what I actually want to say.

But it did not write this for me.

And I am not going to keep changing my own voice because a detector has decided what human writing is supposed to look like.

That is the part that bothers me most.

The minute we start letting a detector dictate how we write, or how we interpret someone else’s writing, we have handed it far more authority than it deserves.

I’m not doing that.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk… Now here is what I wrote for you this week.

There were seven of us who were together constantly.

Dinners. Drinks. Apartments. Weekends. Random weeknights that turned into entire evenings filled with errands, movies, takeout, laughter, and tears.

We were in and out of each other’s lives so often that, in my memory, the whole thing feels like one long continuous scene.

So, when one of those friends recently told me he barely remembers another one of those friends, I honestly thought he was joking and laughed.

He wasn’t joking and I can’t stop thinking about it.

In my version of those years, of course they all remember each other.

How could we not?!

One of them was there.

The other one was there.

I was there.

We were all there!

Except apparently being in the same place at the same time does not mean we live with the same version of what happened.

That seems painfully obvious when I write it down.

It does not feel obvious when someone looks at a part of your shared history and says, essentially, that they don’t really remember any of it.

I have always treated memory as some sort of internal filing cabinet.

This happened. Then this happened.

These people were there.

This is what it felt like.

As the years pass, the less I believe memory works that way though.

We all save different pieces of the same experiences.

One person remembers the dinner, someone else remembers the argument afterward, someone remembers the apartment, someone else remembers the music that was playing.

One person remembers a friendship as central to that entire period. Another barely remembers the person at all.

What’s crazy is that all of those versions can be true.

That is the part I find utterly fascinating.

Not that one of us is right and the other is wrong, but that we can live through the exact same period of time and come away with completely different evidence of it.

I have thought about this a lot while writing Living With Caution Cones.

People have asked if any of the book really happened.

The easy answer is none of it, it’s a work of fiction.

I am not trying to be cagey. It’s all been fictionalized to the point of fantasy because I am no longer convinced there is one clean version of “what really happened.”

There is what I remember.

There is what someone else remembers.

And then, somewhere underneath all of that, is whatever actually happened.

Good luck finding that.

I think that is one of the reasons turning spotty memories into fiction felt surprisingly natural.

I was never trying to transcribe a historical record.

I started with the things that never left me.

A feeling.

A friendship.

A ridiculous night out.

A person’s sheer presence in a room and the way that room felt when everyone was there.

And then I let the story become something else completely without looking back.

Memory does that too because we keep what matters to us. We lose what doesn’t and we edit without even realizing we are doing it in the moment.

We assign importance after the fact and apparently we forget entire people someone else would swear was a main character in all of it.

We remember tiny moments nobody else noticed and eventually those tiny moments turn into the story we tell ourselves about who we were then.

I don’t think that makes memory unreliable in a bad way, it just makes it deeply personal.

One person not remembering another does not erase that person from my version of those years and my remembering them so clearly does not mean someone else is wrong about what happened.

We simply carried different things out of the moment.

That is what all of us do. We leave moments of our lives with our arms full of whatever our brain, or maybe our heart, decided was worth keeping from it.

Years later, if we are immensely lucky, we get to compare notes on what we brought with us with other people that were there.

And sometimes those collections will barely match at all.

Same years.

Same rooms.

Same people.

Completely different versions of what transpired.

That has got to be one of the loveliest things about shared history.

None of us gets to own it completely.

The people we love keep pieces of our lives that we have long forgotten and we get to keep pieces of theirs.

A sibling remembers something about you at nine that you don’t remember at all.

An old friend remembers the person you were at twenty-five.

Your spouse remembers some tiny moment from your first year together that totally disappeared from your own memory.

Someone you don’t even remember ever meeting is carrying a version of you that no longer exists anywhere except in their mind.

And you are probably doing the same for someone else you met in passing.

Maybe that is what memory really is. It’s certainly not one story everyone agrees upon.

Memory is a collection of pieces spread among the people who were there.

We shared the years and carried very different parts of them away.

But this afternoon I decided that when pictures and comments started showing up about Living With Caution Cones this week in DMs, texts, and social media posts, I wanted to write about what that feels like instead.

There are photos of my book in people’s hands, on desks, next to reading glasses, and propped up next to actual construction cones. Someone even sent me a picture of the book on a street corner in Chicago where the story is set.

I saw comments like:

“I have a little crush on Claire.”

“I fell in love with all of the characters.”

“It felt like I knew all the characters instantly.”

So, you know what, that other article can happily wait a week.

But this is the part that feels wobbly all over again.

Of course, I hoped people would like the book.

I hoped they would get to know Claire. I hoped they would understand the friendships between the characters. I hoped the chaotic hum of their lives would feel fun rather than messy. I hoped someone might finish the last page with exactly the kind of warm and fuzzy feeling I had. Hint: they did.

Hoping for that outcome and actually seeing comments confirm it are two very different things.

A reader commented on Amazon, “I fell in love with all of the characters. Would love a family like that.”

That stopped me for a minute because that is exactly the story I wanted to tell.

Not the plot, but absolutely the feeling behind it.

Living With Caution Cones is about the people who become family before you ever decide that they are.

Another comment said that it felt like she knew the characters instantly.

And that is the strangest part for me in this moment.

I have known these characters for a long time and now other people are getting to know them too.

A week ago, I was still adjusting to the idea that Living With Caution Cones existed outside my control.

This week, people are reading it, putting it on their nightstands, talking about Claire, and having opinions about the characters.

I think this might be the exact moment a book actually leaves its author.

Not when it gets published like I naively thought before.

A book leaves its author when somebody else starts caring about the people inside it.

Now that it is actually here, I keep thinking:

Oh no, people are going to read it!

Writing a book is a private experience, even when you know, or at least hope, that someone will eventually read it. And more than that, you hope a lot of people will read it.

For years, Living With Caution Cones existed in forms that still felt fully manageable. Handwritten pages in a file folder. A manuscript on my computer. If I’m being honest, several manuscripts on my computer that I would toggle back and forth between because I had no clue what I was doing. Edits I could make and re-make along side sentences I could change and change again.

Even when the cover FINALLY arrived, it still didn’t feel real.

But now there are copies of my book out in the world that I cannot endlessly revise. There are pages someone can read without me sitting beside them to explain what I meant.

This is the part I did not fully prepare for.

And it’s scary as Hell.

Maybe a story is not completely finished when the final sentence is written.

Maybe it is finished when it reaches a person who brings an entirely different life to its pages through their eyes.

All this time I thought getting my book into the world would feel like an ending.

Instead, it feels like standing at the beginning of something I can no longer control and I am standing on wobbly legs.

This is exciting.

And terrifying.

And, apparently, the whole point.

This is not how I imagined writing this post.

I woke up before sunrise today with the strange feeling that I should check Amazon.

There it was.

Living With Caution Cones.

Available.

Publication date: July 23.

Which means my novel has apparently been available for five days… our family has been traveling, no one notified me, and I had absolutely no idea. Sounds about right… ha!

I’m choosing not to dwell on that this morning.

Instead, I want to sit with something much bigger.

More than twenty years ago, I started writing this story by hand on leftover paper from a client print job. Those pages lived in a file folder that followed me through multiple moves, marriage, motherhood, heartbreak, joy, and everything in between.

It was just something I couldn’t quite let go of.

Today…

It’s a book.

A real one.

If you’ve been reading my articles, notes, and following along on this journey, or cheering me on from the sidelines…

Thank you!

You’ve been part of this story long before it ever reached Amazon.

I honestly don’t have words big enough for what I’m feeling.

Just…

Thank you.

Living With Caution Cones is officially available.

And yes… we’ll talk about the unexpected launch story another day.

Living With Caution Cones

Not because they disappeared.

But because we both kept moving forward.

Some people remember us as children or teenagers.

They remember us before careers.

Before marriages.

Before we had children.

Before we learned certain lessons the hard way.

They remember the person we were when we thought our future would look completely different.

Every once in a while, someone tells a story about you that you’d almost forgotten.

“Remember when…”

And suddenly you’re transported back to a version of yourself that feels both completely familiar and like a total stranger.

You remember what mattered to you at that time.

What worried you.

What you were absolutely certain of.

What you couldn’t possibly have imagined.

It’s a strange feeling to realize you’ve lived enough life to have multiple versions of who you were before who you are.

The rowdy teenager.

The ambitious twenty-something.

The friend who was always available.

The person who hadn’t yet experienced the things that would eventually shape them.

None of them disappeared entirely.

They’re all still part of you.

They’re just no longer the whole story.

That might just be one of the greatest gifts of old friendships.

The people who’ve known us across different chapters of our lives don’t just remember what happened.

They remember who we were while it was happening.

They’ll remind us of qualities we’d forgotten we had.

They’ll laugh about something we’d never think to mention ourselves.

They’ll tell a story that makes us realize we’ve changed more than we realized.

And every now and then, they’ll remind us that the person we’ve become didn’t appear overnight.

Maybe that’s why I’m so grateful for the people who knew me before.

Not because they keep me from changing.

But because they remind me how far I’ve come.

And because somewhere in their memories lives a version of me that helped become the person writing these words today.

For years, this story existed in pieces.

It lived in a worn file folder on leftover paper from a botched printing job.

It has since lived in notebooks.

On computer screens.

In edits.

In conversations.

In my imagination.

Then it became a manuscript.

Somehow, even after all that, it still didn’t quite feel like a book.

That has now changed.

The final cover files have arrived.

For the first time, I wasn’t looking at a collection of chapters.

I was looking at Living With Caution Cones.

My book finally has a face.

It’s funny how something can occupy so much of your life and still surprise you when it becomes tangible.

I’ve looked at these words thousands of times.

I’ve rewritten sentences.

Moved chapters.

Fictionalized characters.

Questioned nearly everything.

But seeing the title sitting on an actual cover design… felt different.

I can imagine someone I’ve never met holding it in a bookstore.

Setting it on a bedside table.

Packing it in a suitcase.

Passing it to a friend and saying, “I think you’ll like this.”

For so long, this story belonged only to me.

Then it belonged to my editor.

Then to a publisher.

And now, little by little, it’s beginning to belong to the world.

That’s both exhilarating and totally terrifying.

Mostly, though...

I’m grateful.

Grateful to everyone who’s been reading these essays.

Grateful to those of you who’ve been here since this was simply a story about a file folder.

Grateful that one day soon, you’ll finally get to meet Claire.

And maybe...

Just maybe...

She and her friends will remind you of someone you’ve known.

Or someone you used to be.

Every group of friends does too.

The stories that somehow survive every move, every birthday, every new chapter of life.

You already know how they begin.

You know who’s going to interrupt and when.

You know who insists that’s not exactly how it happened.

You know where everyone laughs (or rolls their eyes) before the sentence is even finished.

And, you never get tired of hearing them.

What’s funny is that the stories themselves are rarely extraordinary.

They’re so often about something completely ordinary…

A vacation that didn’t go as planned.

A dinner that became legendary for all the wrong (or absolutely right) reasons.

A wrong turn.

An inside joke.

An outfit no one has ever been allowed to forget.

A shoe with your foot still in it that disappeared into a manhole. Don’t ask…

The details become polished over time.

Someone remembers one version.

Someone else remembers another.

Certain parts grow funnier with every telling.

Other parts fade away.

Eventually, the story isn’t just about what happened.

It’s about who you were together.

I think that’s why we keep telling them.

Not because we’re afraid we’ll forget.

But because every time we do, we get to visit that version of ourselves again.

The people we were.

The way we laughed.

The way the room felt.

The certainty that we’d all be together again next weekend.

Those stories don’t survive because they’re the biggest moments of our lives.

They survive because they somehow capture the spirit of the time that was had.

One story begins to represent hundreds of ordinary days.

One joke becomes shorthand for an entire friendship.

One memory holds an entire chapter of life.

Maybe that’s what stories have always done.

Not preserve every detail.

Preserve the feeling.

The facts may soften around the edges.

The timeline may blur.

Someone will always remember one part differently than someone else.

But somehow the heart of the story remains.

Maybe that’s because the stories we tell again and again were never really about proving what actually happened factually.

They are about remembering who we were while it was happening.

The answer isn’t a percentage.

The answer is, it’s a process.

The story began with real memories, real friendships, and moments from a time of my life that meant a great deal to me.

But memories aren’t novels.

As I kept writing, I realized the people I loved deserved their own lives, not a place on the page exactly as they were.

So the characters slowly became individuals unto themselves.

Some are inspired by more than one person. Some carry only the smallest spark of someone I once knew. Others surprised me entirely.

The same was true of the story.

Certain moments began with something that really happened.

Others were imagined.

Many were stitched together from different memories until they became something new.

That’s the beautiful thing about fiction.

It doesn’t ask you to preserve every fact.

It asks you to preserve something deeper.

For me, that deeper thing was never the exact sequence of events.

It was the feeling.

The feeling of having friendships that shaped you.

The feeling of believing the future was wide open.

The feeling of looking back years later and realizing those ordinary days became part of who you are.

Some of the novel grew from real life.

Some of it came entirely from imagination.

And somewhere in the middle, a story emerged that no longer belonged to my memories alone.

This story belonged to Claire.

That’s when I knew I wasn’t writing about the past anymore.

I was writing a novel.

Real people come with real histories, real expectations, and real limitations.

Characters don’t.

Characters have the freedom to surprise you.

They can make choices you never made.

They can have conversations that never happened.

They can become people who exist entirely on a page.

And strangely, that’s when the emotional truth became clearer to me.

Certainly not because the story became more factual.

But because it became more honest.

There’s a difference between factual truth and emotional truth.

Factual truth asks, Did this really happen?

Emotional truth asks, Does this feel true?

Emotional truth allows us to explore questions that don’t always have simple answers.

How do friendships shape us?

Why do certain times of life stick with us?

What happens when the people who once felt like our whole world begin building worlds of their own?

Those questions belong to everyone.

Not just me.

That’s why Living With Caution Cones became a novel instead of a memoir.

Not because I wanted to hide the truth.

But because fiction gave me the freedom to tell a bigger one.

At the time, there were so many things that seemed important.

The next big job.

The great night out.

The perfect outfit.

Who was dating whom.

Who was there.

Who wasn’t.

The things we worried about felt enormous because they were happening in real time.

And to be fair, some of them were actually important.

They were part of the story.

But looking back now, it’s funny what survives.

Not physically survives.

But what survives in memory.

I don’t spend much time thinking about the clients.

I don’t remember what anybody earned.

I couldn’t tell you what most people drove.

And yet I can still picture six people sitting on a living room floor laughing so hard nobody could finish a sentence.

I remember notes slipped under my door.

I remember someone showing up because they had seen something during the day and immediately thought of me.

I remember my crowded bathroom and music playing loudly and the feeling like there was always someone around.

I remember conversations that felt so important before any of us had the experience to know whether they actually were in the grand scheme of things.

But those are the things that have stayed with me.

Time has a funny way of editing the story we thought we had memorized.

It quietly removes certain details and holds tightly to others.

And not always the ones you expect either.

As the years go by, I have come to realize that memory keeps its own scorecard.

And it isn’t at all impressed by titles, accomplishments, or status.

Instead, it hangs on to moments. Little blinks. Sounds. Smells.

People.

Laughter.

The small acts of kindness that felt ordinary at the time.

Maybe that’s why those years remain so vivid.

Not because everything about them was particularly extraordinary.

But because so much of what mattered was happening in plain sight.

We just didn’t know it yet.

If you had asked me then what I thought I would remember twenty-five years later, I would have been completely wrong.

And honestly, I’m so glad I am.

The “last times” come fast and furious as you watch you children grow up before your eyes. The last time our now teenage daughter curled up in my lap because she wanted to or the last time our now teenage son called the remote a ‘comote’ unironically.

With friendships it’s different.

I wish I could tell you there was a specific moment. There wasn’t.

I wish it was something obvious I could pinpoint. There isn’t.

A final night. A goodbye speech. A clear ending.

But that’s not how it happened.

At least not for me.

For a long time, I assumed that version of my life would simply continue.

The homes.

The friendships.

The constant feeling that someone was always about to walk through the door.

It never occurred to me that it was temporary then.

And maybe that’s because nothing changed all at once.

Life rarely works that way.

Instead, it happened a little at a time. It happened slowly.

One person got busy.

Another moved.

Someone started building a life that no longer revolved around the group.

Then someone else did too.

At first, none of it seemed significant.

People missed dinners.

Plans got rescheduled.

Schedules became harder to coordinate.

Normal things.

Adult things.

The kind of things that happen without anyone paying much attention.

Until one day it was impossible not to pay attention.

I don’t remember exactly when I noticed it.

I just remember realizing that what had once felt effortless suddenly required planning.

And that felt very different.

For years, everyone had simply existed in each other’s lives.

No invitations necessary.

No scheduling apps. Mostly because they didn’t exist.

No checking calendars three weeks in advance.

We all just showed up.

And then, gradually, we didn’t.

Not because anyone cared less.

Not because anyone loved each other less.

Life was simply asking different things from all of us.

And we answered those calls instead.

Looking back, I think that’s the part nobody warns you about.

The ending of a friendship rarely feels like an ending while it’s happening. Especially when it’s almost unintentional.

It just feels like life.

It isn’t until years later when you realize you were witnessing a transition without knowing it.

The apartments were still there.

The friendships were still there.

The people were still there.

But something had shifted.

The center of gravity had moved.

And a chapter that once felt permanent had quietly begun becoming a memory.

Looking back, I think that’s what we remember most about that period of life.

Not the specific nights out. Not the apartments. Not even the individual people, as important as they each were.

It was the feeling that everything was still very much unwritten.

Nobody knew how their story was going to turn out.

People changed jobs without overthinking it. They moved across the city. Started businesses. Ended relationships. Fell in love. Reinvented themselves and then sometimes reinvented themselves all over again six months later.

There was always someone making a big decision.

Someone applying for a job they weren’t entirely qualified for.

Someone packing boxes.

Someone convinced they had finally figured out exactly what they wanted.

And someone else changing their mind entirely.

At the time, none of it felt particularly remarkable.

It just felt like the life we were living.

We were all moving forward without a map, making decisions with whatever information we had at the moment and trusting ourselves to figure out the rest later.

Oh, the joys of being young.

Nobody had all the answers, but somehow that felt more exciting than frightening.

There was still so much room for surprise.

One friend was convinced they were headed in one direction, only to end up somewhere completely different. Another stumbled into exactly the life they had always imagined. Most of us landed somewhere in between.

And the truth is, I don’t think any of us spent much time thinking about all the possibilities at all.

When you’re living in it, it just feels normal.

You assume there will always be another opportunity.

Another version of the future.

Another open door.

Looking back now, I realize how rare that feeling truly is.

Eventually life begins to take shape.

Careers become careers.

Relationships become marriages.

Cities become homes.

Choices become histories.

The future narrows significantly. Not in a bad way, but in the natural way that happens when possibilities you didn’t know were happening slowly become the reality of our lives.

You actually notice that you became the person you spent years becoming.

And while there is something beautiful about that, there is also something wistfully beautiful about the years that came before.

The years when nobody knew exactly where they were headed.

The years when almost every door still felt open.

The years when the people we would eventually become were still introducing themselves to the world.

Maybe that’s why those memories stay with us for as long as they do.

Not because everything was perfect.

Not because we would necessarily ever want to go back.

But because for a little while, possibility was everywhere.

We just didn’t know it in the moment.

At least not in the way people do now.

The people closest to us had the code to the building, and more often than not, my loft door wasn’t locked anyway. Sometimes it was even propped open - For Shame! Someone was always stopping by. Someone was always already there.

Looking back, I think the places we lived were almost characters themselves.

Mine was a loft in the middle of a busy downtown area that somehow became the place everyone ended up. Partly because another person in our group lived a few floors below me, but mostly because once one person arrived, everyone else eventually followed.

The building itself took on a rhythm of its own.

People coming upstairs carrying takeout. Someone yelling through the hallway that they were there. Music already playing before the elevator doors fully opened.

Nobody asked before helping themselves to food. They knew where everything was anyway.

We spent hours laying on the living room floor laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. We got ready for nights out crowded into my tiny bathroom, parading around in different outfits long before anyone would have thought to call it “getting ready with me.”

At the time, none of it felt notable or particularly memorable.

It just felt like life.

Looking back on it though, there are definitely core memories built into everyday coming and goings.

Sometimes I would come home and find little notes slipped under my door on the rare chance it had been locked. Other times it was food someone had dropped off because they saw something during the day and immediately thought I would love it.

Music was always playing.

The giant book of CDs sat next to the six-disc changer, and someone was constantly flipping through it trying to decide what came next.

What seems so interesting now that I am looking back is how much our living spaces reflected who we all were at the time.

Mine was eclectic and lived-in, with pieces of my life everywhere you looked.

Some apartments were almost empty because furniture and decor barely mattered to the people living there.

Others looked like they had been assembled slowly from curbsides, garage sales, and whatever happened to work at the moment.

And then there were the apartments that somehow already looked fully formed. Perfectly arranged. Everything in its place.

At the time, those differences just felt like individual personality.

Now they almost feel like early clues about who everyone would eventually become.

But for a little while, all of those spaces were completely connected.

Doors open. Music playing. Someone arriving. Someone leaving. Someone asleep on the couch.

And somehow, no matter where the night started, everyone eventually ended up together again.

Every group has a version of them, even if it looks a little different from the outside. And everything looks different from the outside.

There’s the one who is always just a little late, but somehow still the center of everything once they arrive.

The one who seems to move through life slightly ahead of everyone else, and one says it out loud, it’s just group lore.

The one who holds things together in ways no one fully notices until they aren’t there and something falls apart completely.

At the time, you don’t think about it in those terms though.

They’re just your friends.

Somehow over time, everyone quietly becomes known for something.

The one who can talk their way out of anything.

The one who disappears for a week and returns with a completely new life plan.

The one who insists they’re staying in, only to somehow be the first person ready to go out an hour later.

The one who remembers everything.

In the moment, it all feels so permanent. Like their roles in your life have always existed and always will.

You assume there will always be another dinner, another birthday, another night where everyone somehow ends up back in the same apartment talking long after they should have gone home.

And maybe that’s what makes those friendships feel so distinct when you look back on them later.

Not because every moment was extraordinary, but because of how deeply everyone became woven into the fabric of your everyday life.

People knew your stories before you had to tell them. They knew what your silence meant. They knew who you were becoming before you fully knew yourself.

It’s hard to explain that kind of closeness to people who haven’t lived inside it. And impossible to explain how strange it feels once life begins to shift and everyone slowly becomes versions of themselves outside the group that once felt like home.

But for a certain period of time, those people can feel almost inseparable from who you are and maybe that’s why those years stay with us the way they do.

Not because everything was perfect, but because for a little while, life felt deeply shared.

Not in a dramatic, autonomy ending way. Just in the way our days naturally unfold around each other all the time.

You don’t necessarily plan to see them. You just do.

Someone is always stopping by. Someone is always on their way. Apartments are rarely quiet, and even when they are, it feels like it is only a matter of time until someone knocks on the door. Or doesn’t even knock and walks right in.

Plans are loose at best. Dinner turns into drinks, drinks turn into something else entirely, and before you know it, it’s much later than it should be and no one seems to mind. Or alternately, you end up in a pile on the couch watching a movie you have all watched too many times, reciting the lines, and surrounded by takeout.

When it’s happening, it doesn’t feel unusual. It just feels like life.

But looking back on it years later, those moments in time were something very specific and special.

It was a kind of closeness that belongs to only a certain window of time. Before things settle down and life gets busy. Before people start moving in different directions. Before life becomes something that needs to be planned and executed instead of simply lived.

There’s an ease to it those moments… a rhythm like a steady drumbeat you love the sound of.

It’s the same stories told over and over again. The same jokes that somehow never get old. It’s the private language only you speak with them and the quiet understanding that these are your people, and this is where you belong.

You don’t think about it ending in those moments. It doesn’t even occur to you that it might.

And maybe that’s part of what makes it so distinct when you look back on those friendships years later. It isn’t just the nights themselves, but the feeling of being in it together. The feeling of building a life at the same time, in the same place, side by side, without really knowing what any of it would become.

It’s the kind of time that stays with you.

Even long after everything and everyone has moved on.

We were all simply walking down the street, me in far too tall pastel pink silk Prada ballet pumps.

I slipped, and one of my feet, adorned with that gorgeous shoe, went straight into a manhole.

They laughed so hard they could barely stand up. Once they recovered and determined the shoes were not damaged. Because priorities. That’s the exact moment they started calling themselves my “caution cones,” because without them, they couldn’t imagine the kind of trouble I might fall into.

It was always said lightly, but there was something very true underneath it.

There are moments in life when the people around us become a kind of structure. Not in a rigid way, but in the way they shape your days, your decisions, and sometimes even your sense of direction. They don’t necessarily stop you from making mistakes, but they stand beside you while you make them. And sometimes even laugh so hard they can’t breathe.

At the time, I don’t think any of us thought much about it. It was just something we said. Something that made us laugh, remembering the night that started it all.

But later, when I began to think about the story as a whole, that image stayed with me.

The idea of moving through a period of life surrounded by people who are, in their own ways, guiding you, warning you, or simply marking the path as you go.

When it came time to name this book, I realized it already had one.

Because in many ways, that’s exactly what the story is about.

Not just growing up, or figuring things out, but doing it alongside a group of people who become part of how you navigate the world.

And learning, eventually, what happens when those relationships begin to shift.

I didn’t write Living With Caution Cones because I wanted to be a published author. I started writing it because I didn’t want to forget a particular moment in life.

There was something magical about living in my late 20’s, running a business, running around the city with people I loved and knew loved me too. At that time, those friendships were the central love story of my life and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Most of the early pages were handwritten on leftover paper from a botched printing job for a client. I put them in a simple file folder and didn’t think much about it. The folder moved with me four times, following me from one chapter of my life into the next.

When I began writing, I thought I was capturing something small. Just memories for us about our wild nights, our friendships, who we thought we were in the world, and the absolute insanity of it all. It was my way of holding onto a group of people and a season of life that felt rare and fleeting, even as it was happening.

Years passed.

Eventually I realized that if the story was ever going to leave that file folder, the people in it would need to become characters. Once I found a way to fictionalize them; to protect what was real while still telling the emotional truth, the pages began to come alive.

And somewhere along the way, those handwritten memories became a novel.

I’ll occasionally share writing, reflections, and updates. I’m glad you’re here.