This book is a compilation of poems I wrote, captions from my Instagram feed, memories from my childhood and photos I took with my analog cameras during my twenties. This is 10 years of work I didn’t know I was producing, in the midst of an anxiety that didn’t allow me to think I was producing anything at all. Gathering all these moments and pieces has made me understand who has continued to live inside of me, despite my constant doubts about who I am, and what I’m here for.

Making this book is both a rite of passage and a homage to those years, places and people that are gone, in case I ever lose my memory, and I need to remember what fleeting thoughts and small things I felt to be especially relevant at the time. I’d like to thank my grandmother for her heavy relationship with time, my mother for her painful use of freedom and my dad for his lifelong regrets – for gifting me with an ongoing grieving process I’ve now learned to worship as a religion of mine. Cheers to sadness. There’s nothing wrong with that.