Dear Reader,

If you have arrived here with a notebook full of drafted explanations, you may lay them down.

This is not a courtroom where you must prove your innocence before receiving warm dry socks. It is an atlas of the places you learned to inhabit when someone convinced you that your existence was an imposition requiring constant editorial revision.

For a long time, you probably believed that if you only found the exact right phrase, the wolves would stop circling the porch and come inside to sit politely by the stove. You polished your sentences until they gleamed. You apologized for the temperature of the room, the sound of the rain, and the fact that you required air to breathe.

“The wolves were never confused by your grammar. They understood you with absolute clarity. That is why they asked you to draft another defense.”

The red thread running through these pages is not an ornament. It is the line you hold in your hand as you walk backward out of rooms where you were only ever loved on condition of your silence.