there is only one reason i enjoy signing into facebook anymore – to see the memories

it’s become a ritual of sorts, on the nights that i’m still awake when cinderella’s curfew hits, that i open the app to see what fresh images it will serve me from ‘on this day [x many] years ago’

today, it takes me back exactly a decade, and though it feels like it could have been that long ago – obviously. it was – there is something off in seeing an absolutely accurate timestamp on this particular memory. it is a memory of a post i shared the day i was going to NY for six weeks. how i wish i could take that trip again now. instead, i’m planning on stealing six days in the fall if i can. and though i’d love more, i’m actually also very content with that possibility — as long as one of those days is a friday and i get to spend it at the nuyorican. and i need to check if and when the bowery still has their weekly poetry nights because my memory isn’t currently holding a reminder of when that might be. perhaps because there was a time i was spending multiple nights a week there so they all overlap in the way that only time can let them

even just the idea of being back in either of those venues floods my body with a kind of endorphin that i haven’t felt for a minute. i start to think of what an evening in those spaces might look like. would i continue to miss lily’s after a show to indulge in her jerk corn and roti with curried vegetables? would i have to debate between her plantains or banana pudding, or would my stomach make space enough for both? i can hear the music. i can feel the way the dim lighting in the colorful room soothes me. i’m there already

a past version of me is there. as is a future version. we’re discussing the poems. which one moved us the most – shook something that was lodged deep inside. the way everything shook the night i saw that sweet man who could only remember the way his fingers meant to move on his instrument as his memory of everything else began to fade. he took the stage to perform one more, maybe last, time

i can’t remember too much from his performance, but i remember the way i felt: open, loving, and in awe of him and all of the elders in my life. i remember it made me feel closer to my grandfather – alive then, a coast away, with his memory in tact, but somehow there with me that night too

past me and future me discuss my grandfather, and how even though there’s probably a way to tally all the sentences ever exchanged between him and i, there was a certain bond there that i appreciated and nurtured in my own way as i matured. there is another version of my timeline where i had enough courage to start more conversations with him. to ask him questions that maybe were the starting point of long and deep conversations we never had in this timeline

past me and future me talk about that night and remember another artist who took the stage… wait, was it that same night or another one? it must have been another trip, years after my first, when a poet got up in all her glory and prefaced her piece with a statement about a certain politician coming to power and how it felt like the world was ending, so even though she never does this publicly, f– it, she does now, she said

did she know as she said that, that she was planting a seed of inspiration inside me? did she know that at the time i had been walking around the city wrestling with an existential dread that would eventually break me but then free me? did she know that over the years to come at least one person in that room would chew on that sentence many times over — each time tasting something different in her words?

past me and future me talk about all the artists we can think of. all to avoid, or at least skirt around, discussing ourselves. how the first time i came here for 40 days, i said it was to write a story, and i penned a chunk of it but never finished. and another time, i had the chance to be here for half that time and wrote half as much until i shied away from the page for so long it almost felt permanent

and this is the point where i can no longer hear the conversation between those two versions of myself. perhaps because i know this is the point where present me needs to interrupt, or to take charge. to begin writing all those stories hidden in between the folds of what could be and what might have been. and maybe then i’ll add more seats to the table, and fill them with an abundance of possibilities of all the coming versions of myself.