I didn’t mean to start writing again.

This collection began not as poetry, but as survival. A voice from the past re-emerged in my life. It was familiar, soul-shaking, and deeply unfinished. What started as messages and memories quickly became something else. Something more. A flood of emotion too large for ordinary language, and too important to ignore. So, I reached for the only thing that’s ever matched my depth of thought, the page.

It had been 25 years since I last wrote anything real.

The last time I did, I was silenced. A Senior NCO found and read a poem I had written about heartbreak. I was told clearly that there was no place for that kind of vulnerability in an Airman. So I stopped. I hardened. I excelled. But I stopped writing. I didn’t know then that I wasn’t just putting down my pen, I was burying a vital part of myself.

This collection is the exhumation.

Each piece reflects a moment, a memory, or a meaning too loud to stay quiet. But more than that, this is a map of emotional evolution, from wonder to grief, intimacy to silence, longing to letting go. The poems are arranged in the order I wrote them, because that’s how they should be read. You’ll see the shape of a relationship, real, imagined, and unfinished, through metaphor, subtext, questions, and heartache.

You’ll see how a game of words turned into something much deeper. And you’ll see what I didn’t say during.

Some poems are messy. Some are polished. Some rhyme, most don’t. But all of them are true.

This is not a love story, though it’s full of love. It’s not a tragedy, though there’s loss. It’s not closure. It’s exposure.

I didn’t write these for the world. I wrote them because I couldn’t not. But if you find yourself in these pages, if they stir something in you, then maybe they weren’t just mine to carry after all.

This space is for her, from a distance, with love...