Some things I have only known how to say in writing.

I write a lot about love. Maybe because few human experiences show us so clearly who we really are. For a long time I believed that loving someone deeply meant trying to understand them even when I could not grasp what was happening. Looking for reasons behind their silences, their absences, their contradictions. Telling myself they perhaps needed time, space, patience, or simply a little more understanding.

And there is something beautiful in trying to understand the person we love. But there is also a line that is hard to recognize, and it is the moment when understanding the other begins to mean no longer listening to ourselves. I have learned that loving is not the problem.

I do not believe that romantic love is a mistake, or that giving yourself fully to a relationship is a weakness we need to correct. I still believe in that strange decision to share a life with someone, to let another person know us up close, confront us, unsettle us, keep us company and, in that encounter, push us to know ourselves better too.

A relationship can be one of the great places of transformation in our life. It teaches us to be careful with our words, it teaches us empathy, to negotiate our differences, to stay when something is uncomfortable and to build that small world of codes, memories, habits and meanings that only two people fully understand.

But building something together should not require disappearing as individuals. Perhaps that is why I write poems. Because there are things the mind understands long before the heart does. We can know that something is over and still feel it. We can accept that we have to leave and still want to stay. We can recognize that someone can no longer walk beside us and, even so, keep intact for a while the part of us that loved them.

The heart does not always move at the same pace as the mind. And I do not think we should be ashamed of that. What interests me is learning to love without abandoning myself. To give myself without disappearing. To understand the other without turning every wound into an explanation. To leave when staying means betraying myself and, even after being hurt, to keep the ability to trust.

Because maybe one of the saddest consequences of pain would not be losing someone, but letting what happened convince us that it is never worth believing in anyone again. These poems are born in that territory. Between love and loss. Between staying and knowing when to leave. Between what the mind has already understood and what the heart is still learning to release. They do not try to explain love. They are, simply, a way of moving through it.