for as long as I can remember myself

thoughts from may 12, 2026:

I find myself here after words exchanged in dialogue with another woman. A particular phrase she offered — for as long as I can remember myself — has been lingering in my spirit since. The following thoughts, questions, reflections are what have unfurled.

What is it to remember oneself? To be the safekeeper and tender of one’s existence? To make the structuring of memory conscious, intentional, incessant?

I realize that I am a well of all this life that I have lived. A repository of all the glory and storms that reside deep within my bones. For as long as I can remember myself, I must also remember that I am a culmination of emotions, experiences, and echoes that have given me shape.

The keeping of myself is to inhabit it all. The heartache, the laughter, and every sentiment that lies in between. It is in knowing myself, and in offering myself to be known, in full measure.

This remembering of myself is willful. It is to bear the weight of all that I am, to extend simultaneously both forward and backwards. To bend time/create rhythm/make meaning/remain expansive.

It is to recognize that I am continuous. That here, in this dwelling place of my being, I am but a vessel carrying movement, carrying history, carrying preludes, carrying entries, carrying exits, carrying questions, carrying answers, carrying restraint, carrying surrender, carrying contradictions, carrying harmony — all while concurrently willing these things into existence/breath/being.

I do not know it to be any other way. Because if I fail to actively remember myself, then in whose hands am I leaving the narrative/the knowing/the carrying on of my being?

With every breath that exits my lungs, there is this remembering that weaves itself into my hips, my thighs, my darkness, my light, my lineage, my blood, my downpour, my floods.

And so, I write, I dance, I scream, I breathe, I pray, I ache, I bleed — for as long as I can remember myself.

the remembrance of me

·

Jan 11

I say that I am scripture. And when I say that, I take into account that scripture is not just beautiful. It’s convicting. It’s confusing. It’s heavy and layered. But that is what I am. That is who I am.