there is an esteemed, crimson-stained tradition submitting to the red book. every five years past commencement, the alums tidy up their life updates and submit their stories for publication. you may even call it a collective recollection.
📕
All I do is remix memory; the seasons have always been my time-keeper.
2021 · The long, limbic hibernation ended. Carried a boarding pass to seat 15C, settled into a park-side apartment. The fog rolled in. Rearranged cheap furniture, put up familiar postcards on a white wall. Peeled those same postcards off a dorm room wall, once. Ordered dinner (indoors, finally) with different people, different nights. The hills came alive. Stood solitary on a cliffside, and (spoiler) this moment is later retold as an origin story.
I spent much of the year in retrospect, wondering and waiting. Everything receded at the edges of my childhood bedroom, boxed into a 16:9 grid. An imprint at sixteen metamorphized into relentless self-possession at twenty-two. I didn’t know how much of myself I’d originally sacrificed at the altar.
2022 · Wrote poetry, on a Tuesday. Showed up at doorsteps with pillowy loaves of focaccia. Miffy queens and tulip gardens. Woke up for a five a.m. promenade, dug my high heels into dirt, took grad photos for the family photo album. Wondered if this is how it would have felt when this still meant everything. Don’t know when I stopped searching for closure, two years late.
Red sandstone; sargassum, cenotes, eight cities; observation car crosswords.
I’d loved where I’d worked; then one autumn evening, it wasn’t where I worked anymore. Part of me had grown up there—in the post-graduate ache for a new institution to serve—then outgrown overnight. Another psychic wound next to this one.
2023 · Bought a one-way trans-pacific flight. Asiatic dispatches—ate voraciously, prayed little, loved fully. The camera roll remembers what I can’t: white sand, rice terraces, artificial waterfalls; amber skies, staircase hikes, favorite olives. Tandem three-week rail passes.
The summer I turned ( mapless, molten, mine )
I was so eager to make myself anew, but had never sculpted without a reference image. A crucible for molten personhood. I had been spilled out from a jar, tipped over and poured out, and heaved myself in half-hearted attempts at new forms. A formlessness that made me question if I only ever knew how to take the shape of my containers.
2024 · I am governed now by concentric rhythms. Work late, field trip at sunset, flee to the mountains; repeat. An interlude: cut open on health’s demand. The days are well-worn and chaptered, and I’ll occasionally dog-ear pages to return to. The years aren’t too far apart, but I trust that what matters, whatever stays, is what sticks; it gets smudged and sun-faded, is sometimes scar tissue.
Letting go allows you to grow. I’ve said it aloud enough times to believe it at a cellular-level. I have been listening to the clockwork lately—steady, insistent, diegetic—finding the greatest joy in the things that make me tick. Started to crack myself open, finally.
—san francisco, california. 10pm.