GAIUS IS

I remember well the childhood struggle to find steady ground in a world that often pushed forceful expectations onto me, repeatedly convincing me that the things I felt could not align with the correct way to be. I wanted to tell a story that casts a light on what it means and how it feels to navigate a world that, rather than wishing to find out who you are, tells you who to be by confining you to stifling constructs of expression. And the light of realisation and personal emancipation that can be found through time, with the learning of memory, the companionship of others, the embracing of what is kind.

I knew I wanted to write something with this motif in mind, to speak from the pulse of queerness, the pursuit of colour, to synthesise memories with fiction and experimental imagination. I started writing this book in the winter of 2023, but after beginning, I had no idea where to take it. And so I left it, for months. I thought perhaps it was an idea that would be left unfinished, that I would maybe, at some point, revisit.

Eventually I began again. I remember listening to a piano sonata, pencil to paper, and finding that flow state where words easily string to more. Somehow, after this time I had gained a certain new perspective. The story was blossoming. I sat down each day, for a long while or a little while, and wrote. It wasn't long before the story became real, detailed and multilayered, that I watched it grow into itself and find out about what it wished to tell. Much of it was written that way: pencil to paper, music to ears. Some parts came to mind sporadically, others with slow patience. It soon became a story that held the themes I initially had in mind, and somehow even more. I took time with this book, moulding it carefully. A small sculpture of words.