My name is Haritha, and I am eighteen years old.
I have been called precocious for most of my life, though I have never known quite what to do with the word. It seemed, at times, less a description than a prediction, a suggestion that I ought to arrive somewhere before my peers, as though wisdom were a destination and not an endless act of wandering. What I do know is that I have always loved books. They were among the first places in which I recognized
myself and the first places in which I learned how to disappear. Long before I understood the mechanics of
writing, I was captivated by its alchemy, the ability of ink and paper to preserve a thought, a feeling, a life. I write for much the same reason I read, to make sense of things that resist easy understanding. Of memory. Of change. Of the strange and often invisible architecture of a life. This is my first book, it is not a record of conclusions so much as an archive of questions, collected over years of reading, observing, forgetting, and remembering. Whatever understanding exists within these pages was arrived at slowly, and remains unfinished