Vulnerable Times (EPUB)

you're finally here. i can finally say: thank you for trusting me. i've been told i write good, and there's only one way to find out: read me. and for a more authentic emotional experience, get the paperback. but here's good too: faster, convenient, flexible, everlasting.

much love, maia

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest—Ralph Waldo Emerson.

There are losses that come with a funeral. And then there are the losses that leave us in a state of limbo. Losses so difficult to mourn when grief has nowhere to go.

This book is about those delicate forms of separation—with the self and others. It asks what happens when someone is absent but not gone, when memory becomes a form of attachment, and when letting go complicates by st(r)anding still and staying while the life somewhere beyond us, a life in which we no longer have a place, forces us to go the other way.

This book comes with death and loss, but also leaves so much space for grieving the living, the grief that comes after abandonment, estrangement, imagined distance.

At the centre of the book is a paradox: how do we mourn someone who still exists? How do we let go parts of the self we’ve outgrown?

A collection of episodic snapshots where meet-ups and chance encounters spark unforeseen consequences, where past traumas seep into the quiet corners of the everyday, where emotions run raw and untamed. Time moves like a slow ache, tender yet unforgiving.

These are stories of vulnerability, of longing, of coincidentalmoments that shape lives—sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, always unpredictable. Because in the end, if life is stranger than fiction, how would fiction hold the weight that is life?

Moving between love and departure, death and disappearance, stories in this book consider the strange economies of loss: what we keep, what we invent, what we cannot relinquish, and what we are forced to become while accepting that not every loss is an ending, and that absence continues to live inside our broken hearts.