This book started, in a sense, the day I first understood what my mother meant when she told me that great people are made of passion. I didn't understand it then. I'm not sure I fully understand it now. But I've spent enough years turning her words over, watching them prove true in ways I never expected, that I felt it was finally time to write them down properly instead of carrying them only in memory.
What follows are four chapters that came out of a single, ordinary life: a boy who grew up faster than he should have, a mother who taught him everything she knew before she had to leave, and a girl named Elizabeth who, against every reasonable expectation, became the answer to a question I didn't know I was asking.
This isn't a book about getting everything right. I got plenty wrong, and I say so, plainly, more than once. It's a book about desire and affection, about the strange weight of growing up too quickly, about learning to actually see people rather than just look at them, and about the particular, stubborn kind of hope that keeps a person chasing something worth having, however long it takes.
I wrote it the way my mother used to tell stories: plainly, honestly, and trusting that the meaning would arrive in its own time, even if it took the reader years to fully see it, the way it took me.
This is where it starts.