When I think about the beginning, it was a table. A fold-up table on a street in New York City where I sold my little paintings, and he — Gabe, my boyfriend at the time, my love, the musician with a constellation's worth of songs inside him — would appear like a secret agent, pretending to be a customer. He would pick things up, tilt his head, ask me questions he already knew the answers to. Strangers would see his excitement and start gathering, curious. The whole energy would shift. It was as if the tiny fire I had been tending quietly suddenly threw off enough light for others to notice.
We were just babies when we started dating — in our early twenties, living in Brooklyn, barely knowing how to exist as grown-ups. We thought a sleeve of saltines could be dinner. We didn’t know how to do taxes or boil an egg. But we knew how to be messy, flawed, creative, humans. That was the part we trusted.
Even then, Gabe was always quietly, fiercely supporting me. One of my clearest memories is the time he secretly went to our local art store shortly after I started making and selling small paintings on the street. He learned how to stretch a giant canvas, and surprised me with it. No big speeches, no fanfare — just a deep, quiet encouragement: Go bigger. Keep going.
Gabe has loaded and unloaded my paintings at least a thousand times. Maybe two thousand. He carried them through stairwells that smelled like soup, over cracked sidewalks, down subway stairs and across craft fair loading docks. He never said, “This is too much.” He just adjusted his grip.
Once, in Chicago, the sky opened up when I was selling my art at an outdoor Renegade Craft Fair. Not normal rain. Buckets of water dumped sideways, wind lifted everything into the air. Someone tried to hold down a tent with their whole body and ended up surfing it three feet into a mud pit.
Gabe sprung into action and built a rain gutter out of duct tape, zip ties, and the whispered truce that sometimes happens between a person and a storm. Because sometimes loving someone looks like crawling through a hurricane to save their dreams.
When I got my first real book deal — the kind where someone calls you and says yes, we believe in you — he jumped so hard the floorboards shuddered. Our whole tiny world shook. His joy was big enough to lift the house, and it almost did.
What’s even more beautiful is that Gabe isn't just the guy helping from the sidelines. He is a musician, a songwriter, a maker of sounds that feel like you already lived them in a dream you forgot. His songs are small universes where everything you loved and lost is still waiting for you. He plays the guitar like a lake talks to the moon — or like he’s hatching an invisible, diamond, egg.
We’ve moved across the country, raised two wild and golden children, bought an old house with cracked bones and made it stand strong again. Through all of it, the creative connection between us has never dulled. It just keeps humming louder, like the honey bees that moved into our walls one summer, their steady vibrations gently rocking our bodies, building a hive in the spaces we share.
