Before I Knew the Word is a quiet coming-of-age novel set during the first year of university in a country where queerness exists mostly in silence.

The story follows a reserved first-year student who has always lived on the edges of social circles—present, polite, but never fully seen. He does not understand romance the way others seem to. Crushes, attraction, and desire are concepts he knows only in theory, not experience. Loneliness has become so familiar that he mistakes it for personality.

University promises reinvention, but instead confronts him with the same question he has never learned how to answer: Who am I supposed to be?

His cousin, confident and effortlessly loved, becomes both an anchor and an unsettling mirror. Surrounded by friends, laughter, and attention, the cousin moves through campus with an ease the narrator cannot imitate. When their worlds overlap—through shared spaces, mutual friends, and unspoken closeness—the narrator begins to notice feelings that do not fit into the categories he knows.

The novel traces the formation of friendships, the small humiliations and quiet victories of campus life, and the slow, internal unraveling of assumptions about self and desire. There is no dramatic revelation, no sudden clarity—only moments that linger too long, silences that feel charged, and a growing awareness that some feelings arrive before they are understood.

As the narrator observes others fall into love easily, he begins to question whether his difference is emptiness or simply something unnamed. In a society where sexuality is rarely discussed and never explored openly, he must navigate confusion without guidance, learning that identity is not discovered all at once, but assembled slowly from uncertainty.

Before I Knew the Word is not a story about finding love, but about finding language—for selfhood, for longing, and for the truth that some realizations begin long before we know how to speak them.

Chapter 1 - Chapter 1 — Orientation Week