444
- Apr 26
- 6 min read
On writing, losing my dad, and learning to trust a path I couldn't see.
My 444 candle has been lit for three hours, and I have written exactly nothing.
It's a Sunday in Brookline. Pitter patter. Soft rain on the windowsill, apartment half-cleaned, dirty laundry spilling out of the bin, Barefoot Dreams blanket pulled up to my chin. My fingers dance on the keyboard with such fervor until my body freezes, and the delete button is used with no mercy. I go back to sitting here, waiting for the right words to just appear on the screen so I won’t have to look for them in the places that still hurt.
I have been trying to write this for days. Not because I don’t know what to say. Because this story is unfinished. It means I would have to really sit with it, without a plan, a next step, or anything to hold onto except the rain, this candle, and the quiet that grief leaves behind when it moves in but never fully moves out.
So, here is my story.
My Start
A week before my freshman year of college, my dad was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer.
He told me to go anyway. So I went to Indiana University as a business major and spent the entire first semester driving six hours back and forth to Michigan alone, with nothing but time and the slow, shameful realization that I was miserable. That business wasn't my path. That life is genuinely too short to sleepwalk through it.
So, I woke up. I applied to fifteen schools and chose Boston University. In that same February, my dad was deemed cancer-free. Both things happening at once felt like the universe exhaling. Like sunshine filling up my soul that had been dark for far too long.
I transferred sophomore year, undecided, and gave myself permission to just feel what called me instead of forcing a path that didn't fit.
I took a writing class–COM 201. My professor, Amy McHugh, asked us to write something real, so I wrote a profile of my dad. I wrote about the diagnosis, the drives, the fear, the way cancer quietly rearranges everything around it without asking permission. I wrote it as honestly as I knew how, which was the scariest thing I had done in college.
As I read my profile piece aloud in class for feedback, concealed sniffles turned into full-body tears around the room. My professor, with mascara funneling down her cheeks, told me that she could see it in a professional journal.
I had never thought of myself as a writer before that moment. After it, I couldn't think of myself as anything else. Writing had taken the most painful thing in my life and alchemized it into something that moved people. I didn't fully understand what that meant yet, but I knew this feeling was something too powerful to ignore.
The Why
My sophomore summer was spent in Paris. I walked around that city feeling like something in me was finally pointing somewhere real. I took two BU hospitality courses, fell in love with the world of luxury, added a minor, and came home different in ways I'm still finding words for.
The day before my program ended, my mom called.
Dad was in the hospital. “Come home,” she said.
I knew that feeling. The specific dread of your world tilting again, the ground shifting under something you thought was finally stable. Two weeks later, my dad passed away. It was 4:44 in the afternoon. Exactly two years after his diagnosis, down to the day, plus one for the leap year.
At his viewing, I printed copies of the essay I had written about him in COM 201. Over the course of that night, people came up to me one by one, each holding that paper, crying in a way people don't usually let themselves cry in public. Telling me how much it moved them. Telling me it said something they hadn't been able to say themselves.
I stood there thinking: this is what writing does.
I came back to BU carrying that, and him. Not knowing what came next, but knowing, for the first time, what I was made of.
Full Stop
Junior year, I got an internship at Tiffany & Co. in New York in Global Internal Communications. It was a title I didn't fully understand when I accepted it, but I said yes anyway.
New York that summer felt like confirmation of the industry, the city, and the work. My friend from the internship told me she was heading to Paris for a master's in fashion and luxury management at Institut Français de la Mode, and something lit up in me immediately. I came back to campus and built toward the applications, recommendations, and interviews quietly. Someone told me I was a shoo-in.
I got a copywriting internship at David Yurman for after graduation. I told myself it was a bridge while I waited for Paris to begin.
On April 10th, I learned there was nothing to bridge to. I appealed. They said no again.
I sat in my apartment and read the email over and over. What hit me wasn't just the rejection–it was the version of myself I had already become in my head. The life I had built in my mind, carefully and quietly, over an entire year, completely gone.
I thought about my dad that day. About how he sat in the hospital bed and told me to go live my life anyway. I meddled with the nuances of grief, how loss makes every other loss feel bigger, not smaller, how it all lives in the same place inside you. How writing is the only thing that has ever helped me make sense of any of it.
Where I am Now
I have been sitting with this for five days, and I still don't have a clean way to wrap it up. I don't think I'm supposed to.
Here is what writing has taught me, more than any class or internship or plan: the truth is the only thing worth saying. Skip the polished version, or the one that can only be told because there is a success at the end. Quit writing about how you had it figured out the whole time. Because you didn’t. And you won’t.
The writing that moves people is real. It’s messy, unresolved, still-in-the-middle. Because that’s what life is, right?
Our generation has stopped telling that version. We erase the failures, dry up the tears from our drives home alone, conceal the rejections we are too ashamed to admit. We wait until there's something to announce before we let anyone see what it actually costs us. I'm telling you the middle because I think someone reading this needs to hear it. Because the middle is where I found out what I was made of, what I wanted to do, and why it mattered.
I don't know what this summer will lead to. I don't know what comes after David Yurman, or after New York, or after any of it. I have stopped pretending I do.
What I know is that I came to BU not knowing anything, and I leave knowing at least this: writing will always tell you the truth about yourself if you let it. And the uncertainty is not the problem. The uncertainty is where everything interesting has happened. Where everything that mattered found me.
My dad passed away at 4:44, and somewhere between then and now, that number became his voice. A license plate on Comm Ave the morning before I got my internship. A woman's nape tattoo outside Boston's airport the day before my ex-boyfriend and I broke up. A train ticket tucked in my pocket on the way to a weekend trip in New York. Angel number 444 means protection, encouragement, security. And above all else, it means you're on the right path.
My 444 candle flickers when I write, and for a while, I feel my dad’s presence again. He urges me to go, figure it out, and trust that the path doesn’t have to be clear to be mine.
Three weeks left. No idea what's next.
But I have my words. And somewhere in the flicker of that candle, I have him too.
And for now, that feels like enough.
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