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The Match: On Knowing Exactly What You're Doing and Doing It Anyway
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 11 2026
Pages: 60
Weight: 0.15
Height: 0.12 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Some people destroy what they hate.
He destroys what he loves.
When Maya's phone lights up on the kitchen counter, the message is harmless. A charger. A coworker. Nothing more. But he turns the phone over anyway, knowing exactly what he is about to do. Within minutes, a good night becomes a wound, and a loving relationship becomes another exhibit in the private museum of everything he has ruined.
He is not careless. He is not unaware. That is the horror of it. He sees the pattern clearly: the match, the relief, the shame, the silence after someone leaves. He knows the good thing is good. He knows the cruel sentence before he says it. He knows the door is still open, and still he stands there, lighting fires.
As Maya, Dev, and his brother Sami each try to reach him in their own way, he is forced to look back at the house that made him, the mother whose grief filled every room, and the child who learned that it was safer to lose something by choice than to wait for it to be taken.
Dark, intimate, and emotionally raw, The Match is a literary psychological novella about self-sabotage, shame, love, and the terrifying gap between awareness and change. It asks one painful question: what if knowing exactly what you are doing is still not enough to stop?
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