staying

Noor is brilliant at fixing broken things. Systems, processes, other people's problems. She can read a room, name the problem, hold it all together. But at home, one message is one word too many, and every door that ever closed behind someone still runs the whole show. Then she climbs the stairs to a Thursday-night somatic circle above a Berlin bicycle shop. Twelve strangers on cushions, learning to feel safe in their own bodies. And Juno: a ceramicist with clay under their nails and no rush in their hands. What follows is not a rescue. It is slower and braver than that. A nervous system learning, one drop of feeling at a time, that people can leave a room and still come back. And that staying is not the same as holding on. Told in short, breath-shaped fragments, Staying is a pocket novel for the anxiously attached, the neurodivergent, and anyone who watches the door from inside every good thing. A companion to Body First, it follows the quiet, unglamorous work of staying with another person, and with yourself. Open it anywhere. Stay as long as you like.