November 13, 2025
This is a factless autobiography. A record of what was never lived in your world, but always felt. An accumulation of numbered fragments—some brief as breath, others sprawling like a flood of tears through the valley of the mind after the gates that once held them could do so no longer.
I write about displacement, dispossession, and the small moments of joy and insight in between. About existing between worlds that refuse me and categories I refuse. About the boxes we’re placed in and the boxes we build for ourselves. About memory as a form of grief, and observation as a form of record—proof of existence, however short.
These are autofictional essays. They draw from my life, but are reshaped. Compressed. Composited. Re-invented from within and without. Names are changed, places transposed, chronology scrambled—to protect privacy and to access a different kind of truth. A special kind of sapience.
All for a world that parallels yours. Recognizable, but slightly off. Familiar streets with different names. Real cities drenched in waves of imagined weather.
There’s truth in the feelings. The psychological topography. The lived emotional experiences that cut and caress. The memories that delight, soothe, and haunt. The private ghosts that won’t let me be. The longing for pasts that are no more, todays that never were, and futures that can never be.
Fiction here can be anything and everything. Or nothing. I will not tell you which is which. Who is who. Or when is where. The ambiguity is method and shield—protection for both your world and mine.
What you’ll find are numbered entries without fixed rhythm or cadence, arriving as they happen. Case studies of my observations of the human condition. Philosophical fragments. Sensory records of places and people. Meditations on identities, signs, symbols, and the shapes and meanings of eternal love amidst the fleetingness of life.
I write from nowhere. A threshold space of my own creation. A space for those who understand that emotional truth is a fact stranger than fiction. Are interested in the spaces between memory and present, between events and imagination. Have felt the weight of not quite belonging, yet dying to. Process the past as a form of grief and the present as a form of witness. Appreciate writing that privileges introspection over action, reflection over resolution, honesty over spectacle.
If you have ever looked at life and wondered whose life it is, this may be for you.
If you are new here, then you may begin anywhere. But I recommend starting with 01: Circumstance as I write them sequentially, but not always chronologically. It’s as straight a path from there, as much as that is possible in this perpetually liminal third space I inhabit.
If you’re returning, then I humbly thank you. Welcome back.
This started as a monologue. It may or may not become a conversation. That I may influence, but cannot control. You’re welcome to respond. I may reply. I may not. But I read everything.
May you find your way.
Dean Bowman
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