I lived in Atlanta with my family in the mid-90s. Hot-lanta wasn’t just hot because of its summer temperatures, it was the “hot” place to live. While its personality wasn’t as clear-cut as New York City’s, Los Angeles’, or Miami’s, it introduced itself to the world as a place of celebrity.

We lived in the Piedmont Park neighborhood. Things were poppin’ all around our apartment. There was a popular spokenword spot in Rio Mall, which no longer stands on North Ave. The Ying-Yang club – I think it’s now called the Apache – featured every genre of urban performance-art imaginable. I remember walking in one night and nude models were standing on the tables in a pose, each one surrounded by artists with canvases or sketch pads. Yowza! It was that kind of creative spontaneity.

It was at this time a mentor of mine introduced me to Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One-Hundred-Years of Solitude.” I took to that novel immediately. My morning routine had become walking to the corner coffeehouse, buying a medium black coffee and a croissant, continuing my walk to Piedmont Park, finding an unoccupied bench that overlooked the lake, munching and slurping, and reading Márquez’s novel. It was during this time of my life that I was working on God-only-knows what draft of my own novel. But Márquez was hindering my progress. My mentor fussed at me, “When are you going to put a period at the end of your book? Finish the damn thing!”

But the artistry of “One-Hundred-Years of Solitude” pushed me to push the limits of my own literary work. So, I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. I did backflips from the end of one draft to the start of another. After doing this for a few years, my mentor enlightened me about a fundamental aspect of my character, “Ek, you like the journey. You don’t give a damn about the destination. That’s why you can’t finish your book. That’s why you keep starting one hustle after another.” He was right – I enjoy the journey more than the destination.

This section – GOING THROUGH – will chronicle my journey through Dear Old Morehouse. I hope that when I finally move my tassel from right to left, I won’t backflip in some kind of way. I understand the physics of living – when a person goes through something, there is supposed to be a side that’s opposite from where they entered.