How do you write from a place that doesn’t exist anymore?
The old me is gone.
She left a long time ago. She was silly (in the worst kind of way) and selfish and sad, dripping ink onto paper like tears onto pillowcases. She made chapped melodies out of quarter and sixteenth notes, trading laughter for broken lullabies and hellos for hollowed-out Thursdays at home under the covers.
That place within me has since been replaced by everything good that the Universe has to offer. She’s overflowing. She’s… alive, awoke, and filled with the possibility of success and human, imperfect perfection. She is real. She is cognizant. She is present, forgiving, illustrious, inspired. She is everything right.
So how can this be reconciled? How did what was, become what is?
I like to think that writing is a personal process by which we express our emotions in an indelible sense. I believe in it, like a faith handed down and held close to the chest, wooly, double-breasted, warm. Unlike speech, writing has permanence. It is heavy, sacred, curved, buoyant. It transcends space and time, with characters dancing on pages like heated acrobats, their insides lit on fire as trails of tempered genius radiate from their bodies.
I remember when I first wrote, for myself, that is. It was magical.
My cousin Ritta bought me a silk-bound, skinny purple tapestry-printed notebook that she told me I could take anywhere with me, so that when I was inspired, I could just pour out, pen to paper. I didn’t have a name for the book, but I should have. She earned that right. She was my secret, my respite. I didn’t have to share, or make overtures, or even be right. I could just be…me. For a girl struggling to know herself, that meant a lot.
And so I wrote. About everything. About nothing. I wrote about Nick in the ninth grade, whose stares down the hallway between fifth and sixth period meant the world to me. Darn it, he was perfect. He listened to A Tribe Called Quest and wore shrunken vintage Berkeley tees and skateboarded and made everything in my little 14-year-old brain good and right and whole.
I wrote about some of my “best” friends, who casually taunted my Blackness and made me think that being different was akin to walking around with the plague. I wrote about my parents, whose love story I somehow intrinsically understood but didn’t have the words to tell it. I wrote about my body, a body that was weird and awkward and couldn’t stand up straight but wanted to be touched by someone who had known and felt what I hadn’t.
And of course, I wrote about the mundane. About the Montclair AC Transit Bus, about how the hot chocolate at Café Roma on the corner of Monterey and Hopkins tasted like stale chalk and sugared raisins, about how our “new” house was really just old and ugly, about how I secretly resented my parents for moving us to a city where I realized that everyone looked like me but seemed so different. I hadn’t grown up in that life. But then again, I guess hadn’t even grown up yet.
But, then things happened.
Or maybe life happened.
Or maybe I happened to life. Or maybe it happened to me.
Either way, I began to experience the things I had only dreamed about, or (fictitiously) written about in my notebook. I played with boys (both literally and metaphorically), I went to parties, I tried things that I was perhaps too young to process but too excited not to quietly brag about, all the while weaving tales of juvenile delinquency in my journal that held all my secrets like a kind of stoic gatekeeper. I just wanted to make something more of myself than a parent’s perfect child. I wanted a life that seemed bigger than my own.
College came and I still wrote. But this time, life had me in its grip tightly. Which meant more happiness, more excitement, more experience, more tears, more grief.And, more importantly, more writing material.
You see, the beauty about writing is that as more of life’s turmoil and chaos seems to present itself, greater opportunities to craft glistening works of art conversely do the same. And this time, the little 14-year-old inside of me decided that she would finally share some of those gate-kept thoughts with others, in hopes of giving someone a little light on days where there simply seemed to be none.
Maybe in some ways, what was still is. Maybe she’s still there. The old me. But she’s just…different. She accepts her past and prepares wholeheartedly for her future while living comfortably in the present. She is forgiving and understanding. She is not jealous, she is kind, she is patient, she loves. She is love.
And maybe, just maybe, what she used to be finally realizes that’s what she really was all along. As a seashell knows its way along the sand.
Maybe I knew my way all along.
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