Gaius is
a novella
"Theodore encounters someone from his past, who, after an evening of rekindling a cherished friendship, presents to him a bucket of wet clay. Through it, his hands forge the subconscious work of a sculpture, a figure that seems to contain so much more than the sum of its parts. Engulfed in curiosity as to why, and how, Theodore is led to make sense of the fractures of his past, and what makes him belong."
I remember well the childhood struggle to feel rooted and find steady ground while wading through a world that I felt often forced unwanted expectations onto me, repeatedly convincing me that the things I felt could not align with the correct way to be. I wanted to tell a story that casts a light on what it means and how it feels to navigate an environment that, rather than wishing to find out who you are, tells you exactly who to be, confining you to such narrow constructs. And the light of realisation and personal emancipation that can be found through time, with the coupling of memory and experience, the learning in companionship with others, the embracing of what was once stiffled. I knew I wanted to write something with this motif in mind, to speak through reflection of my own experiences, to synthesise these memories with fiction and experimental imagination.
I started writing this book in the winter of 2023, but after beginning, I had no idea where to take it. And so I left it. I thought perhaps it was an idea that would be left unfinished, that I would maybe, at some point, revisit. When I eventually began again, I remember listening to a piano sonata, pencil to paper, and finding that flow state where words easily string to more. After this time I had somehow gained a new perspective. The formation of the book, and the story itself, was blossoming into something with the likeness of greyness in the pursuit of colour. I sat down each day, for a long while or a little while, and wrote. It wasn't long before the story became real, detailed and multilayered, that I watched it grow into itself and find out about what it wished to tell. Much of it was written that way: pencil to paper, music plugged in. Some parts came to mind sporadically, others with slow and difficult patience. It soon became a story that held the themes I initially had in mind, and somehow even more. I took time with this book, moulding it carefully like a small sculpture.