be longing is a memoir told in sixteen essays about love, loss, and the lifelong search for belonging. Shonna has lost more people than most. Friends to suicide, cancer, accidents, and sudden illness—many of them before she turned thirty. And every time grief arrived, she reached for connection: sometimes wisely, sometimes recklessly, almost always with her whole heart. This book traces that reaching—through first loves and heartbreaks, through sexual awakening and identity, through friendships that became family and relationships that defied easy categories. It follows Shonna from a small conservative California town where she never quite fit in, through her twenties in Southern California, her early thirties in San Francisco, and eventually to Medellín, Colombia, where she finally began to feel at home in herself. be longing is honest about grief in all its forms—not just the loss of people, but the loss of innocence, identity, and the futures we assumed we'd share. These are stories about what happens when you refuse to stop loving even after love has cost you everything. For anyone who has ever felt like too much and not enough at the same time. For anyone still trying to find their people. For anyone who knows that belonging isn't something you find—it's something you build.