Preface

I did not mean to write this.

It came the way certain things do. Without asking, without a plan.

As if something in me had grown tired of remaining hidden.

Nothing here is finished. Nothing has been made whole.

This digital space holds what has shifted, what softened, what could not return to where it once rested.

If there is tenderness, it is small and easily missed.

If there is opening, it is not sudden, only a slow turning toward something.

I am still learning to trust.

There was a time I believed that staying closed was the only way to remain intact.

That if I held myself carefully enough, quietly enough, nothing could reach me that might take more than I was willing to give.

And I became very good at it.

I learned how to remain how to speak, how to move through the world with precision, with control, with a kind of quiet restraint that made everything appear unchanged.

But there is a quiet cost to that kind of living.

You begin to disappear from yourself.

You begin to forget what it feels like to exist without guarding every part of you.

You begin to live as something contained, not something alive.

And somewhere in that without my permission something in me began to resist.

Not loudly.

Not all at once.

Just enough to make it impossible to return to what I was.

And that is where these words come from.

From the place I kept hidden, not because it was empty, but because it was too full.

From a self that has always spoken in images

In petals that refuse their bloom.

In soil that remembers everything.

In light that does not arrive but waits until it is allowed.

My metaphors are not decoration.

They are translation.

They are the closest I can come to saying what I have carried, without breaking it open too quickly.

Without losing what it means to me in the telling.

If you know how to read them.

You will know me.

Not entirely.

But in the places where language hesitates.

Where meaning slips.

Where something is felt before it is understood.

Because . .

That is where I live.

Between what I can say and what I cannot.

Between clarity and concealment.

Between the self I offer.

And the one I keep just out of reach.

Words arrive to me.

And I must place them somewhere, before they begin to weep within me.

They do not come when I am ready.

They come when I am unguarded.

Late, when the world has quieted.

When the hour no longer belongs to anything but what I have kept inside.

Words keep me awake.

They find me in the stillness of 1 a.m.

Insistent, unresolved as if they have been waiting for the moment I can no longer hold them back.

And I write not because I choose to, but because I cannot leave them there.

Unplaced.

Unspoken.

Turning inward until they begin to break me open.

So this . .

All of this.

Is not a narrative.

It is not a resolution.

It is a record of what happens when I allow myself to remain present with what I feel.

Without forcing it into something easier, cleaner, or more complete.

Read this as you would something living.

With patience.

With care, without needing it to become anything other than what it is.

Because I am still here learning how to exist within myself without retreating.

Learning how to stay when every instinct tells me to close.

Learning how to let something be seen without disappearing in the process.

And these words . .

They are simply what remains.

When I choose, even briefly, to no longer hide.