The Map I Drew on the Way Out

Why I wrote The Pattern Was Never Love

I spent years inside a labyrinth that looked like a relationship. Nice furniture. Good lighting in certain corners. Just enough tenderness to make you think you were almost at the center of something beautiful, when actually you were three corridors deep into a loop that always brought you back to the same wall.

I didn’t know it was a labyrinth while I was in it. Nobody does. That’s the design.

My body knew before I did. My bones were drawing the map while my mind was still calling it home. My blood was keeping records while my heart was still filing the evidence under “love.”

When I finally walked out... and it wasn’t dramatic, it wasn’t cinematic, it was more like a Tuesday where I simply stopped turning left at the wall I’d been turning left at for years... I realized something strange. I had memorized every corridor. Every dead end. Every door that was actually a wall. Every “maybe this time” passage that loops you right back to start while you swear you’re making progress.

I could ha…