I used to think of love as a grammar problem. I thought if I could just get the sentence right, I would get to keep it. If I put myself in the correct position — object, not subject — everything else would settle into place. Language rewards obedience: stay where you’re placed, don’t break the rules, serve your correct purpose. I learned that pretty early. At university, sure, but also before that; in bedrooms, classrooms, and conversations where I was praised for being “easy to talk to” — which is a euphemism for “you don’t resist the shape I’m giving you”.

I became “you”:

“You’re so good at listening.”

“You understand.”

“You don’t need much, do you?”

“You” is a soft cage. It sounds like attention and recognition, when in reality, it’s assignment. Expectation.

For most of my life, I circled around the Woman. I won’t name her. Despite it all, I find myself still wanting to protect her. Perhaps that is a sign I still have further to grow. The Woman, she spoke fluently. That’s the first thing you would notice about her: how well spoken she was. She knew how to move between registers. Sarcasm when she wanted distance, warmth when she wanted closeness, disappointment when she wanted obedience. She could turn a question into a verdict without changing her tone. She had mastered language, and through that, she had mastered people. I admired that. I still do, if I’m being honest. Admiration is the longest-lasting drug.

There’s a moment that keeps returning to me as I try to write this introduction. We were sitting on the floor — very early on, before any of it had happened. I was fifteen, she was twenty-three. She was talking about something awful that had happened to her at my age and I interrupted. A small correction, a harmless clarification. She looked at me like I’d thrown her phone out of the window. But she didn’t yell.

Her face melted into a smile and she said, softly, “no. You don’t get to narrate this.”

I apologised immediately, the way you do when you realise you’ve violated an unspoken rule you had not been aware of. The apology mattered more than the interruption. It meant I had understood hierarchy. Later, much later, I’d learn the term “discursive authority”. It describes who gets to name reality; who gets to say, “this is what this means”. At the time, all I knew was that it felt good to be corrected by her, like she was pulling me back into my lane after I’d drifted too far.

When I tell people what I’m about to tell you, I am asked why I stayed for so long. As if it was a choice I could make soberly. No, staying was inertia and hope wrapped in a beautiful narrative. The truth is, I liked being a footnote in someone else’s story. Footnotes, they don’t take up space. It’s a supportive role; smaller, unessential, additional. I convinced myself that it was humility as the ultimate act of love, that I was choosing care over ego. In reality, what I was choosing was disappearance. Self-abandonment as an abandonment of all the difficulty, complexity, and responsibility that comes with having a self.

Writing this book, I find myself occasionally defaulting to her narrative: her version of events, her view of the world, her perspective. I have to delete entire paragraphs because I realise it’s her speaking instead of me. This has been the most difficult aspect of writing the memoir; not the memories, but the syntax detox. Pulling her adjectives out of my sentences like stray shrapnel. Allowing myself to speak, finally. Asking myself, over and over, “is this how I experienced it or is it how I was taught to describe it?”

The mission of this book is to move the “you” back to “I”. Some days I manage it, some days I find myself writing like I’m still waiting for permission. Maybe I’ll leave those sentences in, so you can see her echo still running through me. Experience for yourself, the impact she left on the shape of my being. A normal amount of damage.

— Sam