It Wasn't Love...: An Intimate Archive of My Silences (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798277642641)

It wasn't love. At least, not the kind that gets a label.

It Wasn't Love... An Intimate Archive of My Silences is a collection of autofiction stories about the quiet forms of care that rarely make it into love songs: a home economics teacher who turns tenderness into a secret syllabus, a boss who learns to surrender control for a single night, a divorced mother who meets a stranger at the boardwalk in Ponce, a religious woman who only finds peace with her ear pressed to another chest, friends who become shelter when life rewrites their plans.

Each story begins with the same refrain-"It wasn't love." From there, the book maps a different kind of intimacy:
not grand declarations, but shared coffee, motel rooms that feel like temporary chapels, bunk beds turned into truces, phone calls that last until sunrise, and small objects saved in a box like an archive of heartbeats.

Written in a clear, breathing prose shaped by both Spanish and English, these pieces move between Puerto Rico and Connecticut, between youth and middle age, between desire and silence. Names, dates, and places are veiled, but the emotions are not. What remains on the page is what lingers after romance fades: gesture, presence, the courage to be vulnerable for a moment and then let go.

This book will resonate with readers who:

• Are drawn to autofiction and literary memoir

• Enjoy intimate, character-driven narratives about desire, aging, divorce, and friendship

• Appreciate stories where small scenes-coffee, a car, a hallway, a seawall-hold entire lives

• Have ever kept their own "archive" of objects from relationships that never had a proper name

At its core, It Wasn't Love... is a testimony to the quiet ways we care for one another and the traces those encounters leave on the body. It is a book about shelter-about the nights when simply being there is all that's needed, and enough.