I did not expect this. After ten years of building a life on my own terms — raising my sons, advancing my career, finding my place within my community — I had quietly made peace with the possibility that a certain kind of love was no longer mine to have. I had stopped looking. And then, in the most ordinary and unexpected of ways, I found Scott.

What followed surprised me completely. Not because love itself surprised me — I am a woman who has loved deeply in many forms, as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend. What surprised me was the quality of this particular love. Its purity. Its patience. Its willingness to be known and to know. I had not encountered anything quite like it before and I recognized it immediately for what it was.

These poems and reflections are my attempt to say what I feel in language adequate to it. I am not a poet by training. I am an accountant by profession, a reader by habit, a dancer by joy, and a woman by full and sometimes difficult experience. I write from all of those places at once. Whether what emerges is poetry in the formal sense is for others to decide. What I can say is that every word is honest and every feeling is real.

I offer this collection alongside Scott’s as the other half of a single conversation — his voice and mine, his tradition and mine, his longing answered by mine.

Priya