This book almost didn't happen. I wrote most of these poems at 2am, in airports, on napkins, in the notes app of a phone I dropped in a river and had to replace. There was never a plan. There was just this thing I couldn't stop doing.
When I finally started pulling everything together into something that resembled a collection, I was sitting on the floor surrounded by printed pages, trying to remember who I was when I wrote each one. Some of them I remembered instantly — the circumstances were so specific I could feel the air from that room again. Others were strangers. Written by a version of me I'd quietly outgrown.
I almost didn't include the early ones. The teenage-years poems, the ones about grief and panic and loving people who weren't good for me. They felt raw in a way that made me want to reach back in time and apologize for them.
But that's exactly why they're in there. Because the whole point of this book is that growth isn't a straight line. You're allowed to be a mess and still be worth reading. The whirlpool doesn't resolve — it just eventually gets quieter. Sometimes.
I hope you find something in here that sounds like a thing you've felt but couldn't name. That's all I was ever trying to do.