Proof I Was Here

The marks a person leaves when the record itself might not survive.Proof I Was Here is a memoir about impermanence and the plain human urge to leave something behind. A companion to A Life Experience, it is built as a series of crossings through a life lived in motion: fatherhood carried across borders, communities built and lost, and the quietest, most durable thread of all, the decision to publish under your own house long after the platforms slipped out of your hands.It asks the questions a person starts asking when the record feels fragile. Why the books came to matter more than the platforms ever did. What you are actually trying to make permanent. What catalog you are building for the people who come after you are gone. It is a book about legacy that never turns sentimental, because the person composing it has watched too much disappear to trust easy comfort.Permanent labels on impermanent things.Interrelated with the sequence SWAY, and composed by Shaun J Apple as he raced his own failing eyes to finish it, it reads with the urgency of someone making proof while the light still holds.It is a quieter book than the main memoir, and in some ways a braver one, because it is about the fear underneath all the making: that none of it will last.For readers of literary memoir on legacy, illness, and a life lived abroad.Honest, unhurried, and quietly moving. A book that does exactly what its title says.