Where The Hours Go

Where the Hours Go is a collection of poems about a woman who spent much of her life learning how to disappear.

Long before she understood what survival meant, she learned the architecture of it: the rooms of childhood, the silence of family wounds, the absence of people who should have protected her, and the invisible rules that taught her how to become smaller, quieter, more useful, and less vulnerable.

As she grows older, those survival mechanisms follow her.

She becomes the woman everyone calls when there is a crisis. She learns to confuse being needed with being loved. She learns to anticipate danger, control what she can, and leave emotionally when staying becomes too painful.

But eventually, disappearing begins to have consequences.

There are unexplained receipts. Messages she doesn't remember sending. Conversations she cannot fully recall. Hours that seem to vanish from her life.

And slowly, she realizes something frightening:

The hours weren't missing.

She was.

The discovery forces her inward.

She begins confronting the voices she has carried for years, especially the Guardian—a protector created by her mind when the child inside her had no one else to depend on. The Guardian is angry, suspicious, defensive, and sometimes destructive. For a long time, Mary believes healing means silencing her.

Instead, she learns to listen.

Through accountability, grief, boundaries, difficult relationships, and the terrifying experience of safe love, Mary begins to understand that survival and living are not the same thing.

She learns that she can acknowledge the harm she has caused without denying the harm that was done to her.

She can leave without disappearing.

She can love without abandoning herself.

She can say no without becoming cruel.

She can be soft without becoming defenseless.

And perhaps most importantly, she can stop treating every part of herself as an enemy.

By the final poems, the internal war begins to quiet.

The Little Girl can speak.

The Guardian can rest.

Mary can remain.

The house inside her is no longer a fortress built entirely around survival. It becomes a home under construction—unfinished, imperfect, but finally hers.

Where the Hours Go ultimately asks a simple but devastating question:

If you spent your life learning how to disappear, what happens when you finally decide to stay?

The answer is not perfection.

It is presence.

It is choosing to remain inside the moment instead of fleeing it.

It is turning toward the wind instead of running from it.

It is discovering that freedom does not always mean leaving.

Sometimes freedom means having the choice to stay.

And sometimes the greatest act of healing is simply this:

I am here.