In Our Own Handwriting

The pages we set aside, and the self they kept.

At the back of a drawer sits a notebook we filled long ago and never opened again. We know it is there. Our hand brushes against it while reaching for something else, and somehow the drawer closes a little faster than we intended. It is a curious thing, to hesitate before our own handwriting. Perhaps because we imagine it has kept us exactly as we were.

One day, we open it anyway.

The handwriting is unmistakably ours. The pages are plainer than we remembered. Lists. Half-finished thoughts. Questions we never answered. Sentences that stop before they arrive anywhere.

We expected a stranger, someone we had not met in years. The voice is ours, only younger.

We are the same hand, further down the page.

The worries have changed their names. The hopes have kept theirs. Everything written here was carried forward, even the parts we thought we had outgrown.

We once measured growth by distance, by how far we had traveled from who we were. The notebook offers something quieter.

The questions did not end. They widened.

What we called certainty was an early reading of something we are still learning to say.

When we close the cover, we do it gently this time.

In keeping,
S. Marie
C U M I C H E