Closing

If this book felt familiar, you are not alone.

PTSD does not require war to be real. Sometimes it comes from homes and names and rooms and people who should have known better. Sometimes it comes from being young in a place that was supposed to be safe and learning, before you had the language for it, that safety was not guaranteed.

Vincent is twenty-nine years old. He has been writing since he was fifteen. In the fourteen years between those two numbers he has filled forty-three notebooks, published seven collections, moved between cities looking for the right distance from where he started, and learned — slowly, imperfectly, with frequent backsliding — that the distance was never the answer. The answer was the pen. The answer was the page. The answer was showing up to the desk every morning and translating what the body knew into language that could be shared.

He is not healed. He does not claim to be. The nervous system still does what the nervous system does. The triggers still arrive without announcement. The nights still get long.

But something has changed. He knows what he is carrying now. He has a name for it. He has forty-three notebooks of evidence that he carried it and kept going. He has this book, which is the most complete thing he has made, which contains the whole shape of what it has cost him and what it has produced.

That is not nothing.

That is, in fact, everything.

If you are still in it — still cycling, still scanning, still trying to make sense of what your body remembers — this book was written for you. Not as a guide. Not as a solution. As company.

He is still here.

So are you.

That is enough to start with.