My 444 candle has been lit for three hours, and I have written exactly nothing.
It’s a Sunday in Brookline as soft rain pitter-patters on the window sill of my half-cleaned apartment, 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 return to sitting, 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, but because this story is unfinished. Writing means I would have to really sit 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 father was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer. He told me to go anyway. So off I went to Indiana University as a business major where I spent my entire first semester driving alone six hours back and forth to Michigan, 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 15 schools and chose Boston University. That same February, my dad was declared 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 in 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 father. I wrote about the diagnosis, the driving, 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 aloud in class for feedback, I could see the concealed sniffles turn into full-on tears around the room. My professor, mascara funneling down her cheeks, told me she could see that writing fitting into 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 took the most painful thing in my life and alchemized it into something that moved people. I didn’t yet fully understand what that meant, 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. It was exactly two years – to the day – after his initial diagnosis, plus one more day for the leap year.
At his viewing, I printed copies of the essay I had written about him. 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. They told me how much it moved them, that it said something they hadn’t been able to say themselves.
I stood there thinking: This is what writing does.
I returned to BU carrying that – and him. I didn’t know what would come next, but I knew, for the first time, what I was made of.
Full Stop
In my junior year, I secured an internship in Global Internal Communications at Tiffany & Co. in New York. It was a title I didn’t fully understand when I accepted it, but I said yes anyway.
That New York summer felt like a 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 immediately lit up in me. I returned to campus and quietly pointed my efforts toward the applications, recommendations, and interviews quietly. Someone told me I was a shoo-in.
The payoff: a copywriting internship at David Yurman after graduation. I told myself it was a bridge while I waited for Paris to call.
On April 10, 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, was completely gone.
I thought about my father 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, and 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 cost us. I’m telling you the middle because I think someone reading this needs to hear it. 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 uncertainty is not the problem. 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. It was there on a license plate on Comm Ave. the morning before I got my internship, on a woman’s nape tattoo outside Logan Airport the day before my boyfriend and I broke up, on a train ticket tucked in my pocket on the way to a weekend trip in New York. Angel number 444 means protection, encouragement, and security. Above all else, it means I’m on the right path.
My 444 candle flickers when I write, and for a while, I feel my father’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.
Keira Shannon is a senior majoring in PR with a focus on luxury communications. After graduation, she is excited to continue sharpening her writing skills within the fashion industry.
Leave a Reply