I Reread My Old Poems and Forgave Myself
The girl in those pages was doing her best with what she knew.
I found the notebook while looking for a phone charger, which is how most hauntings begin.
Bottom drawer of my childhood desk, buried under a nest of dead electronics and a birthday card from 2011. Purple cover, gel pen ink, my name written inside the front in handwriting that still looped its y's like it had somewhere fun to be. Twenty two poems, written by me between the ages of nineteen and twenty one. I sat down on my old twin bed in my mother's house, thirty four years old, and braced myself for the cringe.
Because that was the plan, right? You find your old poems, you laugh at them, you text a photo of the worst line to the group chat, everyone replies with the skull emoji, and the past stays exactly where you left it.
The first few poems cooperated. One rhymed "fire" with "desire," a crime I will answer for at the gates. There was a poem about rain that used the word rain eleven times, I counted. There was one titled "Him" that ran three full pages, and I genuinely could no longer remember... which him.
I laughed. I took the photo for the group chat.
Then I read the seventh poem, put my phone face down on the quilt, and did not pick it up again for two hours.
The seventh poem was about the apartment on Fairmont Street. It described the kitchen exactly: the yellow curtain with the scorch mark, the table that wobbled unless you folded a coaster under one leg, the way I used to wait until his car pulled out of the lot before I turned my music on.
For a decade I had told the story of that relationship as a story about my own stupidity. Why did she stay. Why did she shrink like that. Why did she apologize for the volume of her own music in her own kitchen. I had prosecuted that girl at every family dinner where his name came up, and I always won, because she never showed up to defend herself.
But the poem knew.
That was the part I was not ready for. Written right there in the middle of it all, at twenty years old, in purple gel ink: "I keep my voice in a jar by the door now, so I can grab it fast if I ever leave."
She knew. She was already packing.
I had always imagined self forgiveness arriving like a court verdict, someone official clearing their throat and announcing that upon review, the girl is acquitted of all charges. It does not arrive that way... It arrived on a Tuesday afternoon on a twin bed, in the form of evidence: proof that the person I had spent years calling weak had been writing herself survival notes the entire time and disguising them as bad poetry so that nobody would think to confiscate them.
These were not the diary of a fool. They were the field notes of a girl mapping her way out with the only instrument nobody could take from her.
You cannot forgive yourself in general. You have to do it line by line, in the handwriting of the person you used to be.
I read all twenty two that afternoon, slowly, the way you would read a younger sister's diary if she had handed it to you herself.
Somewhere around page five I stopped being her judge and became her bodyguard.
When a poem flinched, I flinched. When a poem tried to be brave in that overwrought teenage way, ending on lines like "and still I rise with the dawn," I did not roll my eyes. I thought: good girl. Keep saying that until it takes.
The ninth poem was about my grandmother's hands. She died the year after I wrote it, and I had spent years grieving the fact that I could no longer remember her clearly. But the poem remembered for me. The flour in the creases of her knuckles. The wedding ring she kept on a chain because her fingers had thinned. The way she patted dough like it was a child she was putting to sleep. I had been carrying that grief around like a box I could not open, and here was the inventory, itemized, waiting in a drawer. I read it twice and then read everything I could find that week about memory, trying to understand how a girl I had written off had managed to preserve the exact thing the grown woman had lost.
The answer, I think, is that she was paying attention. That was her whole crime, the thing I had held against her for years. She felt everything at full volume. She loved people who were careless with her, she cried in stairwells, she wrote three pages about a boy whose face I cannot picture. I had treated all of that as weakness. Sitting on that bed, I finally saw it for what it was: a person with no armor and no map, walking through her life completely awake.
Nineteen year olds are not supposed to be finished. They are supposed to be porous. She was doing her best with what she knew, and what she knew fit inside one purple notebook, and still she got me out of Fairmont Street alive.
My mother called up the stairs to ask if I wanted tea. I said yes, and then I sat there a while longer doing the strange arithmetic of it. The girl who wrote these poems was closer in age to my mother's granddaughter, if I ever have one, than to me. If a twenty year old showed me these pages today, any twenty year old, a stranger on a bus, I would not laugh. I would probably put a hand over my heart. So why had my own younger self been the one person on earth... exempt from my mercy?
I did not have an answer.
I just knew the statute had run out.
Before I went down for tea, I took a pen from the desk, the same drawer, a hotel pen that still worked, and on the first blank page after her last poem I wrote her a reply. I dated it, because she always dated things. I told her about the apartment I live in now, where the music plays whenever I want. I told her the jar by the door worked. I told her I was sorry it took me fourteen years to read her mail. It was not a good poem either. It rhymed nothing with nothing. Apparently that runs in the family.
Here is the part I did not expect to do. A few weeks later, back in my own city, I typed up the seventh poem exactly as she wrote it, every crooked line break, every overreach, and posted it on a community wall for poets with a one line note: "Written at twenty. Sharing it for her, unedited." I nearly deleted it... twice. That night a stranger commented, "I kept my voice in a jar too. Mine was a gym bag in the trunk." By morning there were eleven replies like that, eleven jars, eleven doors, and I sat in my kitchen genuinely undone by the number of people who had been quietly packing all along.
Later I ended up in the section on forgiveness, reading poems by people who had made peace with their younger selves, and I noticed that every single one was written like a letter to a specific person. None of them forgave in general. It has to be line by line. I stand by that now.
The notebook lives on my bookshelf these days, spine out, between books by real poets, which is exactly where she always wanted to end up. Sometimes I catch the purple cover out of the corner of my eye... and feel the particular peace of a settled case.
And last week, signing a birthday card, I caught my hand looping the y again. First time in years. Somewhere in me, the girl with the gel pen felt the verdict come down, and she is showing off.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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