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Lionheart responsive reader
Lionheart Volume 2 Preview
Before the Road Opens Again: selected excerpts from the developing second volume.
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Before the Road Opens Again
This ten-page edition presents selected first-person excerpts and condensed transitions from the developing second volume. It introduces the voice, emotional weight, humor, contradictions, and movement of the story without replacing the full manuscript.
Volume 2 begins where Volume 1 ends: with me leaving Rochester in 2007 and trying to build a new life in Troy, New York. From there, the story moves through Albany, Schenectady, and Richmond, Virginia, arriving at July 2026 with the work of becoming still unfinished. Dates, names, sequence, and wording may continue to change as the full manuscript is revised and verified.
Content note: This preview includes grief, housing instability, relationship trauma, identity conflict, and references to childhood and family hardship. I did not leave Rochester empty-handed. The ghosts packed themselves.
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The Chrysalis
By 2007, Rochester had become both sanctuary and sarcophagus. It had raised me, educated me, embarrassed me, protected me, and nearly suffocated me. Rochester had given me family, culture, Gospel Ensemble, NSBE, African drum and dance, engineering, radio, chosen brothers, and enough grief to require its own moving truck. So I left.
I arrived in Troy with a new engineering position, a U-Haul full of mismatched furniture, and the dangerous belief that changing cities might change me. The hills were steeper. The winters were colder. The buildings looked like they remembered every factory that had closed and every family that had packed up and gone somewhere warmer. Troy did not look like reinvention. It looked like old brick, narrow streets, complicated parking, and rent due on the first.
The apartment I shared with someone I loved like family became part home, part therapy office, part creative studio, and part emergency planning room. We were two Black men trying to make adulthood look intentional. Most days, it looked like improvisation. We were not simply sharing an apartment. We were trying to become people we had never seen modeled.
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When the Phone Rang
My mother died in July 2008. There is no clever opening for that sentence. No joke. No engineering metaphor. No gospel flourish strong enough to make the words less final. Cathy Lomnick - the woman who had kept boys fed on numbers that did not add up, who could help other families find housing while fighting to keep our own household from collapsing, who survived poverty, illness, judgment, and nearly everything else life threw at her - was suddenly gone.
Death did not arrive like the movies. There was no perfectly scored montage. There were telephone calls, arrangements, decisions, relatives, unfinished conversations, and that strange administrative cruelty grief brings with it.
One month later, a musician I had come to regard as a brother lost his mother too. Grief fused us together. I became manager, promoter, strategist, cheerleader, driver, adviser, protector, believer, and occasionally the person asking why absolutely nothing had started on time. I poured myself into helping somebody else become visible. Partly because I believed in him. Partly because helping him gave me somewhere to put the love that no longer had a mother to receive it.
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Grief Learned to Dance
Albany taught me that grief could wear church clothes. I entered a historic Black congregation carrying engineering credentials, gospel experience, cultural ambition, and enough unresolved pain to power the sanctuary for a month. I sang, served, created programs, supported ministries, and learned how influence moved through a church long before anyone admitted politics had entered the room.
Church gave me purpose, but it also gave me another stage on which to perform fine. The sanctuary was sacred. The people inside it were still people. That distinction cost me several lessons.
Culture remained one of the places I returned to when words could not hold everything. African drum and dance brought rhythm back to a body that had become too accustomed to bracing for impact. Writing became another form of movement. I created characters bold enough to say what I still whispered. Albany did not make me peaceful. It made me rooted enough to keep becoming.
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Brotherhood Became Work
In 2011, I entered Iota Phi Theta Fraternity, Incorporated, looking for brotherhood, tradition, Black male connection, and a place where men could challenge one another without pretending we were invulnerable. I found those things. I also found meetings. Many, many meetings.
Fraternity life gave me brothers, ritual, responsibility, history, and another complicated room in which identity could be both affirmed and concealed. I learned the five foundational principles - Scholarship, Leadership, Citizenship, Fidelity, and Brotherhood - and slowly learned that reciting principles was much easier than building a life around them.
Titles came later: Advisor. Strategist. Webmaster. Vice Polaris. Intake leader. Mentor. Over time, I stopped judging chapters by how loudly they performed loyalty. The real question was whether the organization could protect younger men, survive leadership transitions, and leave something useful behind. The letters looked good on jackets. The principles looked better in practice.
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The Floor Vanished
I arrived in Richmond in 2014 with a promised job, a U-Haul full of belongings, and a gas tank full of faith. Then the job disappeared. No onboarding. No desk. No clean explanation that made the situation less devastating. The professional floor I expected to stand on simply vanished.
For approximately six weeks, my car became bedroom, confessional, sanctuary, closet, dining room, and the place where I planned each next move. Planet Fitness became my bathroom. My retirement account became oxygen. Parking lots became strategic decisions: bright enough to feel safe, dark enough not to attract questions. I told almost nobody. Pride can be a survival tool until it becomes another locked door.
Homelessness did not erase my degree. It made the degree feel like an accusation. My younger brother helped me secure an apartment. Then came a contract engineering position in Charlottesville. The commute was punishing. The pay was low. The work was fragile. But even an exhausting road could feel like proof that the ground might eventually hold.
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The Rooms That Gave Me Back to Myself
Richmond became a collection of rooms. Not every room was safe. Not every room lasted. But several gave pieces of me back. The church balcony became a place where technology and ministry met. Wires, cameras, microphones, computers, livestream software, sound checks, and Sunday worship all occupied the same sacred space. Media ministry was not decoration. It was connection.
The dance floor returned joy to my body. West African drum and dance carried memory. Line dancing carried laughter. Community could be built one count at a time - five, six, seven, eight - without requiring every movement to become a metaphor for trauma. Sometimes a grapevine is just a grapevine. Sometimes joy does not require a dissertation.
Mentoring gave the work a future tense. Sitting with Black boys, college students, younger professionals, fraternity members, engineers, and emerging leaders, I recognized brilliance that often arrived disguised as silence, humor, anger, nervousness, or overconfidence. I could not rewrite my childhood, but I could help somebody else enter adulthood with more preparation, vocabulary, documentation, backup, and encouragement than I had.
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The House Inside Me
Richmond gave me love. Not one clean, uncomplicated version. It gave me relationships that felt like rescue, relationships that felt like home, and relationships that revealed how often I had confused being needed with being safe. I had learned how to build households before I learned how to rest inside them. Building a home is not the same as occupying one. Loyalty is not the same as fear. Being useful is not the same as being cherished.
For years, I treated bisexuality like a private technical condition: real, consequential, and never to be discussed outside a controlled room. Respectability provided protection, but it also required reduction. I had to stop editing myself so aggressively that only the most publicly convenient version survived. Masculinity did not disappear when tenderness entered the room. Faith did not evaporate because questions remained. Leadership did not require emotional starvation.
As the walls between the rooms of my life came down, engineering, Lomnick Professional Services, Lionheart, church media, fraternity leadership, mentoring, and cultural work began to appear as one life instead of unrelated identities. I did not become fearless. I became less willing to abandon myself.
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Still Building. Still Healing. Still Becoming.
Volume 2 is not a victory lap. There is no final scene where every debt disappears, every relationship becomes healthy, every health concern resolves, every project succeeds, and the PE license descends from Heaven surrounded by a choir of angels holding NCEES-approved calculators. That would be convenient. It would also be a lie.
Survival, success, service, intimacy, faith, ambition, health, money, grief, leadership, and legacy do not resolve in a straight line. Some chapters remain active. The man at the end of Volume 2 has not solved himself. He has simply become more honest about the work.
The road from Rochester to Troy, from Troy to Albany, from Albany to Richmond, and from survival toward legacy has been funny, painful, spiritual, technical, romantic, reckless, generous, expensive, healing, frustrating, and occasionally held together by prayer, a full tank of gas, and the last available credit limit. In other words, it has been mine. The road continues beyond the last page.
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