the look back

every so often i collide with the boxes, e-mails, letters, filing cabinets, crates, old notebooks, picture albums, yearbooks, scars on my body, birthday cards, old clothes, scribbled notes, hospital bills, call history, bank statements,  phone book, old bedding, older records, specific lighting, scents and sounds that seep in before i open my eyes. phrases that repeat almost rhythmically.  i cannot place them. they echo, second-nature and never second-guessed, like prayers with which we were indoctrinated; falling out of my mouth in silent hours along with inexplicable tears and a sense of longing that gets stuck in my throat somewhere between whimper and chuckle.

i am a pack rat. a sucker for nostalgia. i have piles and piles of emotion layered and crammed in my chest. i collect todays to turn into the yesterdays that i will at some point yearn for or cry bitterly in memory of.  todays that become the yesterdays scrapbooked or archived in muscle, triggered by a word in a language i have since forgotten. or maybe in a story whose new narrator has, through time, forgotten me.

in this ephemeral world and ever-changing body i cannot risk to lose the memories, nor can i survive without the history. i have pinned down stills and verses that translate back and forth until i can't remember if i encountered them in Spanish or English, or even at all.

i measure growth and self-worth and often self-pity in a 'compare-and-contrast' that leaves me and my memories of myself falling short of each other or outshining each other in dreams.

i am at once in love with and heartbroken for that person i was even two minutes ago.

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i find myself questioning this longing. the bittersweet love for yesterday. attachment to emotions that are long gone. an inability to live solely in the moment.

i contextualize and pathologize it. grapple with it until it becomes affirming.

see it as mourning and celebration. rationalize: loss through immigration and development of new cultural identity. gender dysphoria leaves me mourning and celebrating a me that once was and no longer is. 3-day notices. early abundance of joy and sorrow. friends passed too young. lovers left too soon and often without goodbyes. acknowledgment of constant evolution. i cannot let go of me, i have not gone anywhere, the history pounds on too strong for forgetting. the boxes and books are inscribed in my blood and sweat. i am those yesterdays. so i keep cramming the future into crevices where it makes room for itself.

today is only an hour and a half old. yesterday is still fresh on the tip of my tongue. it tastes like new love and tomorrows. new self that has not wandered too far from a self who has always been. grounded in memory. it is summer, the waves dance warm, but remember the spring.