Books will be shipped out no later than May 31, 2025.

Dear Reader,

Once, before my innocence was stolen,
I knew little of life’s bitter, brutal lessons.
I was only a kid—blind to the pain that was coming.
How naïve I was to believe sorrow wouldn’t accompany me!

Time, however, has a way of teaching you.
I’ve learned the hard way...
Sometimes vicariously through the eyes of other people,
sometimes by staring down the rabbit hole of my own problems.

Tick by tick, day by day, I observed how mortals move:
each like the gears of a clock.
Some of them grinding toward good,
but some toward the unthinkable.

I witnessed families fall apart,
watched as the horror crept in
through the cracks in the walls.
I saw blood spilled.
Tears soaked into the carpet like silent confessions.
Keepsakes clutched by trembling hands.
Madness—like wildfire in the minds of the wounded.

And the worst part?
It wasn’t some far-off story.
It was here.
Right in my neighborhood.
In my home.
In the eyes of my friends.
In the voices of my family.

I realized—I’m no different from them

if I don’t change what’s chained us all.

See, I was born into deprivation.
No father. No guide. No map forward.
I had no one to depend on but me.

And solitude was a lesson that came early.

Family?
They vanished. One by one.
Thirteen deaths before I turned twenty-one.
Thirteen souls. Gone.

My treasured daughter, my beloved nephews; they, too, are gone.

I’ve loved people who betrayed me.
I’ve had friends pray for my downfall.

And I…
I’ve been lost—
utterly lost—
slipping from sanity like sand through my fingers.

I didn’t know what was real.
Didn’t know what to trust.
Didn’t know if there was anything left.

So, I turned inward
to the one voice I had left—
my own.

I started writing.
Pouring my heart into lines,
just to see if the pain would make sense on paper.

So, listen—
in these pages, you may smile.
You may cry.
You may feel sorrow strong enough to break you open.

Most stories talk about happy endings.
But me?
I have to be real with you.

Before there is peace—there’s war.
Before the healing—comes the breaking.
Before the dawn—there is darkness.

This…is my diary.

This is the war before the sunrise…

Prepare yourself.