What does a person become after believing the same lie about themselves for long enough? Long is a meditation on the private philosophies we inherit without consent: the conviction that we are burdens, that we are unworthy of tenderness, that love must first inspect every hidden room before deciding to remain. Across these poems, fear is questioned, shame is called to testify, memory is treated as an unreliable witness, and devotion becomes less an emotion than an act of intellectual defiance.
Moving between quiet confession and philosophical inquiry, Long asks what language can preserve, what it inevitably loses, and whether another person can ever truly know us without first undoing the stories we have mistaken for ourselves. It is a collection about longing, but also about the longer work of being seen, of remaining, and of discovering that the most dangerous things we believe are often not the wounds themselves, but the conclusions we drew from them.
