Lemuel Moshe grew up with a close, loving relationship with his parents. They were his whole world, which made losing his mother when he was seven all the more devastating. His parents were involved in a car accident, and while his mother died, his father survived but never really recovered. Consumed by grief and convinced that the accident was his fault, his father became increasingly unstable and unable to take care of Lemuel. Eventually, CPS (Child Protective Services) stepped in and placed him in the system.

Lemuel never stopped looking for somewhere to put all the things he couldn't say out loud. He'd always loved writing, filling notebooks with whatever was running through his head—thoughts, memories, feelings, little observations, and eventually poetry. Writing became the easiest way for him to make sense of things, especially when talking about them felt impossible.

Music came a little later. At his first group home, he discovered just how much he loved it. At his second foster family, his foster brothers played guitar in the backyard, and Lemuel started joining them, in which he discovered a natural skill. He picked up instruments quickly and found that music gave him another language for things he couldn't quite put into words.

Over the years, Lemuel grew into someone who could turn just about anything into a song. Drums were his first love, guitar came second, and everything else was fair game. Give him an instrument he's never played before and, within ten minutes, he'll probably figure out enough to make something out of it. He writes his own music, plays wherever someone will let him—dive bars, basement shows, house parties, anywhere—and somehow manages to make a Friday night gig feel like a standing appointment.

Now in college, Lemuel is in a fraternity that he mostly joined for the cheap rent and the built-in audience. His major is something he tells people he's interested in, though there's a decent chance he'll switch it before graduation. When he's not in class or at band practice, he's usually writing, playing music, skating around campus, or getting into trouble with his friends. His car has been "temporarily" broken for two semesters, and at this point he's not sure he even wants to fix it. He prefers skating to class anyway.

Despite how easygoing he can seem, Lemuel is still figuring himself out. He's learning how to build relationships without constantly expecting people to leave, how to let people get close, and how to make peace with the parts of his past he spent years avoiding. Through the people around him—including his friends, his foster family, and the relationships he forms along the way, he's slowly discovering that family doesn't always look the way he once thought it would. For the first time, he's beginning to understand that he doesn't have to carry everything alone.