The Beginning

Today my friend asked me a question I couldn’t shake for the rest of the day.

What do you do with all of your poems?

It wasn’t a question I struggled to answer because I didn’t know how. I knew the logistics. I knew the options. What caught me was the quieter part of it—the why. Why I haven’t done anything with them. Why they’ve lived in notebooks, notes apps, margins, forgotten folders. Why I keep writing poems if I never let them leave me.

I came home and looked at them. Really looked. Pages and pages and years and versions of myself I barely recognize anymore. There have to be hundreds. Poems written in waiting rooms, on floors, in the middle of the night, during versions of myself that thought they were temporary.

And I remembered another conversation with the same person, years ago, about what it means to put what we create into the world. About the difference between making something for survival and making something because it deserves a witness.

I don’t know why it took this long for the question to land. Maybe I needed to become someone who could answer it without flinching.

So I’m putting this here as proof. As a timestamp. As something I can return to.

I am writing my first book.

I hope one day I look back at this entry and see that it became real.