He wrote because he did not want to forget.
At five, Renley Nicolas Chu survived the fire that took his parents and his voice. At eight, he was adopted into a home that became, over the next decade, the site of his abuse and trafficking. At seventeen, in stolen hours between hospital wards and safe houses, he began to write-pouring his memories into jars he could carry, before time and other people's cruelty could empty them out.
He died three days before he was meant to come home.
Again, Before I Forget gathers the prose, poems, and letters Renley wrote in the final year of his life, edited and framed by his almost-adoptive mother, Tiffany Chu. The book moves from fire and forgetting through entrapment, dissociation, and survival toward something Ren had nearly stopped believing was possible: to be fully known, and fully loved. Tiffany's quiet introductions hold the context; the writing itself is entirely his.
What remains is not a record of what was done to him, but a testament to who he was-a boy who could not speak, and who refused, even at the end, to go unheard.
This is an uncorrected proof for review purposes, subject to change.
