The settings are intimately from my life, while the characters are halved or broken and stuck together with string and chewing gum because it was too high a cost to my conscious to leave them fully as they were in my real life. Much like in my own life, it would sincerely be easier to narrow down what the book isn't about, vs what it is. 

Morality, Philosophy, Religion, Possession, Addiction, Sex, and even more sinister themes plague this book like worms wiggling their way into a spoiled apple handed to you by a woman promising  you enlightenment, but instead what you get is banished from the garden of Sanity.

I probably don't need to confess... but I will. Memory is fallible, and emotions evolve over time as I discover more truths even now halfway into my 30's, so this novel is an homage to all the versions of me I've been in my life and the moments that acted as anchors in my earnest development to simply just be okay.

When you put the book down, I hope you walk away from it a more curious and compassionate person willing to reach out to others despite you've been programmed all your life to hold on to reasons not to, obsessively protecting yourself from living a full life.
In the meantime, let it be the real world escape for you I've worked my entire adulthood trying to outrun like a young deer running away from the moment their mother dies too soon right in front of them. 

Has my mother died in real life? No. Could I recognize her as the person she was prior to her car accident on Easter that set the stage for the height of the chaos in our lives? Absolutely not. Be it a product of my environment, my various influences, or simply genetics, I am not wired like my peers so I do not shy from being unapologetically descriptive to let you bare in memory what I and others were forced to bare in life. And let me tell you... it was hell at times, so you're not going to just read it. Instead you're going to relive it.

It took me all these years to accept I'm just not wired to fit into being what others want of me, and simply to live and create as I do, not too unlike Casey (just older and thankfully wiser) and not without the scars to prove it. Is that the kind of book you're in need of to dig deep into the past and face the unwanted monsters in YOUR bedroom?

Don't be fooled then. While it starts from the perspective of Casey failing at growing up as quickly as time passes with the mind he's the exception to every rule and knows better than the rest what pain is, it navigates you through the minds of people of all ages on multiple timelines riding a tornado of self doubt into a world that try as you might you are not the hero of and no matter how many times you click your converse shoes, it's not going to do anything but serve as another stem for the vines of your sprawling anxiety.

One of the especially nasty truths you eventually must face is that you don't always even want to be a hero. Sometimes the villain seems like the more fitting option and you slip that costume on like a mask that gives you nightmares night after night as if it isn't coming off. We know now in our 30's it isn't just the Goosebumps series you binge-read at bedtime that was responsible for all those.

Twisted up in your confusion, in some cases you'll be sitting at the death bed of someone that will never be named, and in other cases you'll be visiting a loved one in prison and choking down lunch on your way home, trying to piece together the answers to your own questions of who was under that uniform and what they did with your false hero? What did they do to that wrecked ship who always carried you out of the storm on the wind of your own endless hours of panic attacks, contorting your reality in their suffocating embrace and delusions of what never truly was? Can you identify when the lies start and when they end? Can you identify who started them and why? Did it start with Santa and the Easter Bunny like in most homes, or sometime earlier?

As you discover the planted seeds of truth scattered throughout your life like a rose garden gone wild, you question everything that has ever happened to you and look for a place in which to plant that anger and cultivate it so that it blooms bright red in your itching mind. As you tend to that uncontained garden, you ask yourself where do you truly belong in the world collapsing in on you day by day? Struggling to breathe in the fumes of cigarette smoke with your face buried deep into the size too big leather jacket your false hero left behind, the monsters circle in your mind like a merry-go-round you can't get off of. The hero's absence serves as shattered glass in your foot  from the moment it is introduced to your life. The bites of fire ants that crawl up your pudgy toddler legs while you pick berries with them in the rare moments you visit any representation of family, come to serve as the painful reminder that nothing and no one is as they seem no matter how wide they smile and the ugly truth comes crashing down on you years later about why they're REALLY there to begin with, and why they KEEP choosing to be somewhere else away from the punishing delusions they are living in. 

So I ask you, special reader. Do you think you have the stomach for that rotting apple? What are your shoes telling you? Are they feeling too comfortable with the lies we tell ourselves in our pursuit of calm? I don't promise that you'll get all the answers you'll be conflicted about wanting to the questions that will haunt you, but it's up to you what you do with the ones you are eventually told to swallow. If you think you have what it takes,  I invite you to walk a mile in my shoes and a pile of others.  You just might learn something about your own soul if you do as you walk out of the prison with me for the last time, flipping off the "Have a nice day!" sign, eager for the freedom that awaits you when you never have to see it again.

Discover on the last page, suffering and shrunken down to a final wet-cheeked and raging goodbye, if you can make peace leaving flowers on that grave...and more importantly who is in it?