"I always have half a mind to tear out things

and start again." (April 21, 2011, fifteen going on sixteen,

when I thought myself a scholar and a cut above

myself)

who wanted to reinvent herself

(wearing an old dress with new shoes to junior prom

for a second chance)

but missed the memo that when you start again,

you start Now- with no rewrite,

no retcon of fact

but to destroy the evidence and

cast the past into oblivion.

This is not the same thing.

Memory is liquid and clings

to its vessels:

an old butterfly journal

disjointed cursive letters

an agitated black ink scrawl

liquid time is thin in my fingers without words, a book to bind

it slips from small cupped hands

to evaporate. Or moisten the earth to feed the new grass.

 

But I can still hold a pen

and all the solid things I write [have written] with it.

 

At fifteen: "we are always improving and

favoring the new over the old

versions of ourselves," but

If I erase the bad stuff.

poor choices dumb love hopeless nights

(age twenty: "I can't live in the same body as myself")

more melted would be the memory of

(age twenty) "green farm country, bursting & blooming

and lush all around

Nina Simone crooning through the car speakers

a bird taking a dust bath"

or the dream of a resurrected sevillana

asking me to fix her internet (age nineteen),

a solid memory pinned down by pen:

 

"I touched her

+ her body

was real."