Descent

Here, love becomes a performance. The poems chronicle a steady collapse into silence, denial, and dangerous hope. Abuse enters the body and the home. The speaker tries to save what cannot be saved, internalizing blame while navigating fear. Fatherhood arrives as a sacred calling in the middle of chaos. This is the year-by-year unraveling that so many survivors know well—when loving turns into surviving and survival becomes a quiet act of endurance.

Order of Poems & Prose: Pills – 2019 (prose) – Leap Year – Equally Yoked – Becoming a Father – 2020 (prose) – Fix You – 2021 (prose) – Wild and Free – Sinister – Deceit – 2022 (prose) – Gas Stations – Carbon Monoxide – 2023 (prose) – I Failed – Cold

*Please be advised: This book contains references to physical and emotional abuse, child abuse, gaslighting, suicide threats, and domestic violence. Reader discretion is advised.

Descent

Ultimatum

Jonathan Valania

This is the fourth time this week they’ve come. They’re worried about us — they don’t think we’re making the right choice. We need to stop telling them we fight.

Ultimatum

Jonathan Valania

This is the fourth time this week they’ve come. They’re worried about us — they don’t think we’re making the right choice. We need to stop telling them we fight.

2019: The Year I Proposed

Jonathan Valania

Peace doesn’t live where fear has a key.And love doesn’t ask you to amputate parts of yourself just to be enough.I knew that. But I still stayed.

2019: The Year I Proposed

Jonathan Valania

Peace doesn’t live where fear has a key.And love doesn’t ask you to amputate parts of yourself just to be enough.I knew that. But I still stayed.

Leap Year

Jonathan Valania

I sat at the piano, pirouettes in my fingers, sliding from G to A— earthly hands chasing grace.  

Leap Year

Jonathan Valania

I sat at the piano, pirouettes in my fingers, sliding from G to A— earthly hands chasing grace.  

Equally Yoked

Jonathan Valania

You said we were chosen. That God knit us together. But if He did, why did I feel like I was choking on the thread?

Equally Yoked

Jonathan Valania

You said we were chosen. That God knit us together. But if He did, why did I feel like I was choking on the thread?

Becoming a Father

Jonathan Valania

You’ll never have to earn this.You’ll never have to shrink.You were born to be held.

Becoming a Father

Jonathan Valania

You’ll never have to earn this.You’ll never have to shrink.You were born to be held.

2020: The Year I Became a Father

Jonathan Valania

I held him and everything else all at once.I was terrified. I was proud.I was already grieving—not for him, but for the man I had to become.

2020: The Year I Became a Father

Jonathan Valania

I held him and everything else all at once.I was terrified. I was proud.I was already grieving—not for him, but for the man I had to become.

Read Letters I'll Never Send

What began as court documents, voicemails, and text messages became something more. It's a story about survival, truth-telling, and the long, sacred work of healing.

Letters I’ll Never Send is a raw, autobiographical collection of poems and prose written through the aftermath of emotional abuse. It speaks for the moments you couldn’t. It says what was never safe to say out loud.

Ordering the print edition includes exclusive poems and reflections not available online—and directly supports outreach efforts for survivors of domestic abuse.

This book is for the ones who made it out, and the ones still finding their way.

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Click here to view all the poems in Letters I'll Never Send