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Some books chase spotlight. This one was built for the quiet.
The Record of What It Cost is a curated archive of unsent letters from love, labor, and consequence. Not a memoir. Not fiction in disguise. A record. A witness. An offering for the nights when the world is loud and your silence is louder.
Omari Vale writes like someone keeping receipts in the dark. These letters move through desire and fallout, family math and inherited absence, faith that flickers, survival that invoices the soul, and the kind of mercy that does not arrive clean. Each page is emotionally direct and stylistically confident, lyrical without being decorative, tender without being soft.
This book is engineered to be revisited. Read it straight through as a journey, or return to it like medicine. It even gives you entry points, so you never feel lost inside the voices.
Inside, the archive is organized into five lived identities, each with its own heat and weight:
THE LOVER
FIRE. The beautiful damage. The scaffolding you climbed to reach someone who never planned to stay. The warmth that costs too much.
THE KIN
BONE. What you inherit without consent. The arithmetic of family. The names, the gaps, the quiet grief that teaches you how to become hard.
THE BELIEVER
SMOKE. Prayer as rent. Doubt as devotion. A God who is not a genie and a faith that still expects you to clock in.
THE HUSTLER
HUSTLE. Survival receipts. Street sermons. Choices that can change a life in one breath. This section includes a contribution by Alonzo J. Crippen, delivered with raw clarity and no performance.
THE LIGHTKEEPER
LIGHT. The work after the fire. The maintenance of the soul. Mercy that is built, not begged for. A landing that refuses neat closure and still leaves you breathing.
Between clusters, brief Field Notes re-center the reader and widen the lens, like someone placing a hand on your shoulder and telling you, quietly, you are not the only one.
You will find letters that speak to lovers, to fathers, to sons not yet met, to God, to the self, and to the life you had to live to become who you are. The "you" shifts because life shifts. Because grief has more than one address. Because some truths can only be said sideways.
This is for the ones who kept going without applause.
For the ones who learned how to perform while hurting.
For the ones who became strong and forgot what tenderness felt like.
For anyone who has ever paid a price they never agreed to.
The Record of What It Cost is the kind of book readers highlight heavily, return to often, and buy more than once. One to keep. One to give.
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