Preoccupied is a study of what love asks us to become, and what it leaves behind when we can no longer be that person. These poems trace the strange territory between devotion and self-erasure, asking what remains when the life you built around someone has to become yours again.

a few words

There are some people you leave behind.

There are others you carry with you without meaning to.

I used to think that forgetting was the opposite of remembering. I thought that if I could stop saying someone's name, stop visiting the places where we had been, stop turning ordinary things into evidence of something that happened before, then eventually the story would become what it was supposed to be: finished.

It never did.

Preoccupied is about that failure.

It is about love when it becomes memory, and memory when it becomes accusation. It is about the strange violence of making a home out of another person, only to discover that the house remains standing after they leave. It is about the things I wanted, the things I was given, and the things I convinced myself I had been denied.

Some of these poems remember tenderness.

Some remember cruelty.

Some remember neither particularly well.

I have learned that memory is a terrible witness. It rearranges rooms. It changes names. It makes a stranger out of someone you once knew by touch. Sometimes it protects you; sometimes it incriminates you.

And perhaps that is why I am still writing about it.

Not because I want them back.

Not because I want the past to change.

But because there are absences that become so familiar that they begin to occupy more space than the person ever did.

This is a collection about that occupation.

About what remains when someone is gone—

and why, despite everything,

I am still preoccupied.

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