“What's life but equal parts love and death? You've been closed to both, so, if you don't have a story I don't know what to tell you.”

A friend spoke those words on a cold day around my 23rd birthday in 2006. I'd just come back from abroad; working, traveling and decompressing from the last years in New York City, trying to figure out what to do next.

On many trains while traveling and working in Europe, I'd told small and big stories; after a while all the stories became easier and lad to one another until I found myself telling one long one.

Notes on napkins were all I could muster until, while teaching English in Asia, I found myself trapped by a particularly nasty monsoon season and, locked inside, began what would be the first drafts of “…Around.”

Returning to New York in the fall, I began refining and...