A Year Inside Your Skin: A Journey Through Love, Loss, and Literary Recognition

There are books you write to be read. And then there are books you write because you have no other choice — because the words are already living inside you, pressing against your ribs, demanding to be let out. Not politely. Urgently.

A Year Inside Your Skin was the second kind.

What I wanted to capture — what felt essential from the very beginning — was love in its fullness. Not just one version of it. Not just the romantic spark or the heartache that follows. All of it. The heat of new attraction. The slow burn of desire. The intimacy of being known by someone. And underneath all of that, quieter but just as real: the love you have to find your way back to with yourself.

The collection moves through those layers deliberately. Poems like Nina, Slow Burn, Can I Wear You, Day 28, and Me + U = Forever live in the romantic and the sensual — that electric space where two people are discovering each other, where longing has its own texture, where love feels like something you can almost touch. Nina, in particular, started as something deeply personal: a poem I wrote and sent as a text message to someone I was genuinely interested in at the time. It found its way into the book because it captured something true about that moment — the vulnerability of reaching toward someone and meaning every word.

But the collection doesn't stay only there. Peace & Love: Non-Negotiable pulls in a different direction entirely — toward self-love, toward the hard-won clarity that comes when you stop negotiating yourself away. That poem, and others like it, represent the journey to arrive at yourself. Not as a consolation prize after love doesn't work out, but as its own destination. Its own form of love that deserves as much space on the page as anything else.

Poems that waited

The book came together more quickly than people might assume. But what I brought to that process wasn't just new writing — it was years of poems that had never quite found their home.

Some of what's in this collection I'd written long before this book existed. Remember Me and Forget Me Not are two of them — pieces I'd carried for years, poems that felt finished and true but had nowhere to belong. I'd written them, filed them away, returned to them, and still couldn't place them. Until I started assembling this manuscript and suddenly they fit. Not because I forced them in, but because the book was finally the right container for what they were trying to say.

That's the thing about certain poems: they know what they are before you know where they go. Those pieces waited patiently. When the moment came, they slid into place as if they'd always been there — because in some way, they had.

What I wasn't prepared for

I'd spent so long with these poems — some of them for years — that I'd almost convinced myself they were private. That the specificity of these feelings would make them inaccessible to anyone else. That's the fear every personal writer carries. That in going deep into your own particular truth, you'll find only yourself down there. That the work will be too small to travel.

It wasn't. It doesn't work that way, and I should have known that, but I needed to learn it again.

A woman I've never met told me that one poem described something she thought only she had ever felt, and that reading it had made her cry and laugh at the same time because she finally had the words for it. Another said she read the whole book in one sitting, in her car, parked in her own driveway, and couldn't go inside until she'd finished. A reader described the collection as "intimate, reflective, and emotionally resonant" — honest and thoughtful without feeling overdone.

That is the only recognition that has ever mattered to me. Not algorithms or rankings or industry validation. The moment someone says: I thought I was alone in this. I thought this was mine alone to carry. And then I found your words, and I knew I wasn't.

That is why we write. That is why I write.

If you've read A Year Inside Your Skin — thank you. Genuinely, deeply, from the place where these poems came from. If you haven't yet, I hope it finds you at exactly the right moment. Not when things are easy. When things are real.

How it became a manuscript

At some point I gathered everything. New pieces, older pieces, poems I'd written in my phone and poems I'd written in notebooks, things I'd sent to people and things I'd never shown anyone. I spread it all out and sat with it.

I started to see the shape of something. The poems about desire and connection had their own energy — forward-moving, charged, alive. The poems about self-discovery moved differently — slower, more inward, more certain in a quieter way. And scattered throughout were poems that had been waiting years for exactly this context, finally home.

I arranged them into an arc that felt emotionally true, even if it wasn't strictly chronological. The book moves from longing outward toward something more grounded. It ends not with resolution exactly — love doesn't offer that kind of tidiness — but with motion. With a woman moving forward into herself.

That felt right. I didn't want to tie it up with a bow that the actual experience hadn't offered me.

A note on the title

A Year Inside Your Skin came to me after the manuscript was mostly assembled. I'd been using a working title that was functional but forgettable — the kind that signals the writer hasn't found the real one yet.

And then I wrote that phrase and something in me recognized it immediately. A year inside your skin. It isn't a literal description of how long it took to write. It's an invitation — to be fully present inside your own experience. Inside love when it's happening, inside longing when it aches, inside yourself when everything else goes quiet. To stop translating what you feel into something more manageable and just be in it. Inhabit it. That's what the poems ask the reader to do, and it's what writing them asked of me.

That's what poetry, at its best, does. It doesn't let you lie about how you feel.

This book is a record of that truth. I hope it helps someone else find language for their own.