Peace was not the same thing as happiness. It wasn’t victory, and it wasn’t satisfaction. It was quieter than all of that, steadier too.
My professional life kept growing steadily afterward. A third EP, Surface Tension, pulled three hundred forty thousand streams in its first month. Session work on four Grammy nominated albums followed. A teaching position at Belmont University. A feature interview in Premier Guitar magazine, where a luthier eventually built a custom signature model using wood reclaimed from trees damaged near a lake. The theme was impossible to miss, and I didn’t try to hide it. When they asked what losing the Gibson had taught me, I told them simply that I’d lost a guitar once, and it had taught me that instruments are tools, not identities. What you create matters more than what you own. Music doesn’t sink, even when everything else around you does. That quote traveled further than I expected, probably because people understood it was never really about a guitar at all.
