We Remember

This poem is dedicated to the constant opportunity of earning back our own love and trust. I intended this poem to center body neutrality and to find a place of peace for our entire beings. Through pieces of memories and reflection, We Remember is for those who feel stuck in those time loops and don’t remember how to show one’s body and mind unconditional love. Self-love shouldn’t have an asterisk, but this poem is a reminder that it’s okay to have not gotten there yet. We don’t have to love our bodies every day, but this poem cultivates hope that one day we’ll get there.

Content warning: This poem contatins mentions of sexual assault, disordered eating and alcohol/drug abuse. 

Past

You came to this new home alive and a little sad. Far from what you knew, but happiness comes just as quickly as it goes. You worry you will not find a home in the burrows of your own sheets, smothered in a fading scent you desperately need to replace. You find yourself in a place of trust, of maybe, someday, love, and you bask in it. The late nights of soft touches, even as they grow more rough, the sweet nothings, even as they are no longer sweet, convince you and trap you still.

You whisper no, tell him, no, but he keeps going, takes your stilled body as permission instead of shock or fear. The body remembers even when the mind tries to make us all forget. Only blocking out so much, as we remember the walk to the bathroom. We remember looking into the mirror and checking the time. Knowing we could never tell mom, knowing it’ll hurt more later if we beg to forget now. And it did. Oh, it did. 

The body remembers. 

You had told yourself how much it would rip you apart when your heart would inevitably get broken. He was not a forever, you knew this, he was a day-by-day until one day he had enough. You will come to learn that most of the boys you love believe in forever only many heartbreaks after you. You train your body that forevers are not for us, that she must embrace the night and accept what she is given. Until one night you are touched in the way you remember, where you can finally yell back before you must relive the hurt. But the hurt has always lived within you, and as you walk to the bathroom and stare at the mirror, you feel everything that happened months ago. You thought you had rid of it.

But the body remembers. 

In between life came the care that never fully immersed itself into you. It was small. The late nights you stayed awake for poor reasons, often alone. The far-too-early mornings you woke and couldn’t manifest any sort of hunger. The hunger that would arrive and leave before you could do anything about it. The most you could do was drink, but drink all the wrong things upon your parched mouth. The exhaustion is evident in your eyes, but youth is the best cover-up, and your youth reveled in its own power.

But the body remembers.

When sleep became hard, as you stayed awake until you got the early morning’s New York Times newsletter, until you could finally rest your head, you grew lonely. The night is silent after a certain point, and you used to embrace being alone. But the difference between alone and lonely is the desperation, the depression and the remembrance all wrapped up in the quiet air, waiting for you to crack. 

The body remembers.

The bottom of your shoes is always sticky with alcohol, and you don’t do laundry enough to get rid of the stench. You stopped believing in a God after you spoke to him on a bad night and didn’t hear anything back. You emptied bottles just so you could throw them against your fence and hear them crash and break, scattering across the grass. 

You are the excitement of every party. The attention you’ve always craved is yours, yet you feel it fleeting. You fear missing a beat, missing a night — forgotten. Again, you are no one, just as you were before all of this. The scent of cigarettes stains your skin as your fingers shake, you are awake, you are rife with every one of your cravings. You laugh at the silly boys who called you a convenience. You are grander than life itself and they were simply too stupid to see. Pain is a figment of the mind, and right now, the mind is the enemy. As long as the mind is quiet, there will be no pain.

But the body always remembers. 

Present

This isn’t a love letter. This is an acknowledgment to her, to him, to you. One that you didn’t expect, but needed nonetheless. 

When I look at her, at me, I need to remind myself that more often than not, we are not separate entities. She is not the stranger walking down the road, she is the body holding me, and I am the thoughts and emotions pushing her. Together, we have cackled and cried and felt all the emotions I’ve asked her to manifest until she is too tired to keep going. Together, we always wait for another day, as we know we will wake, in sickness and in health, in all of my hatred and all of her trauma, we move forward. 

We don’t have to perceive ourselves as beautiful. Beauty quietly changes as we get older, and the child resting from decades past will always remember the days she was called ugly. Do you remember dissecting yourself, trying to understand what made you look the way you did? Maybe if you could solve your features like an equation, you could discover the error of your physicality. Even after convincing yourself of your beauty, your body remembers the way you snatched and grabbed and pinched at it.  

Some days are just as hard as before. Where I can leave and my body will walk through my life, doing what needs to be done. But we choose not to. She moves as I go and we hold each other through it all. Sometimes we are pushed apart, vilifying one another, placing blame when it belongs to the past.

The days I cannot remember, refuse to remember, I know she will. I used to hate her for storing trauma like a time capsule, knowing we would one day open it. But all this time she was asking not to be alone, asking me to stop leaving her with the darkness. We are a compilation of the mistakes made, but we were right when we believed we were grander than life. She no longer asks me to obsess over her. And I no longer run away. Where one day we will know this upon instinct, and might even feel serenity with one another. Might even feel all the adoration we couldn’t muster in adolescence. 

Future

And my love, we have.