When I pieced together The Body That Stayed, I thought I was just writing about trauma.
About the things that happened and the woman who survived it all.
and I was.
But somewhere through the process, I realized very deeply that surviving isn’t the end of the story.
Trauma has a strange way of lingering in ordinary moments. It shows up when someone asks, “How are you?” and you suddenly can’t remember how to answer honestly. It shows up in the way you check the locks twice before bed. In the apology that leaves your mouth before you’ve done anything wrong.
It also shows up in love. Not because love fixes it but rather, because love has learn to live beside it.
Last year, I wrote a series of poems in how that would look. Instead of telling the story from my perspective though…
I wrote it through his.
Because while living with trauma is exhausting, it can be equally hard to love someone with trauma. That story deserves to be told too.
There is no specific man. Not someone from my past. Not even someone who exists today.
Just… the person who learns to love a woman whose scar tissue still speaks. Someone who notices she laughs only halfway sometimes. Who occasionally gets it completely wrong, apologizes and tries again.
Because that’s what real love looks like.
Not mind reading.
Not rescuing.
Learning.
I’m tossing the idea around of the book unfolding through the seasons because healing has never felt linear to me. It’s seasonal. There are winters where the body remembers everything. There are summers where you forget you were ever afraid.
There are springs where hope quietly returns before you’re ready to admit you missed it.
And maybe that’s what I’m trying to write now.
The Body That Stayed says, “This is what happened inside of me.”
This next book says, “This is what love sounds like after survival.”
And I think that’s exactly why they belong beside each other.
One teaches history.
The other imagines a future.
One looks inward.
The other looks across the room.
I think that’s a beautiful evolution.