Remember

Remember
By Nikki Patin
C&P 2008

Remember that this is the moment that will define you.

These moments which undermine the fabric of who you are and who you will be.

fabric of you
strong
brown
beautiful

leather
filled with cracks
care-worn
clinging to muscle
buried deep beneath misguided fear

You are the hide of something greater than yourself, woven like sodium in your lashes, stitched with threads of hope, clinging to yourself like a novice on a stallion.

Remember that every moment carries you further from this moment of worthless despair, that these tears are water for your thirsty spirit and that your throat has been your beacon in a life too dark to keep hidden.

Remember.

You are stronger than you ever knew possible and can smile like the sun beaming off your perfect shoulders.

Remember that purpose is the soft belly of discovery, what your fingers find in the dim panic of nothing, what you found when you discovered your voice…

Remember that you had to dig it out. It was not near the surface. Not even close. Remember that your fingers bled and mucked up the earth. Remember that you needed shovels and had no money.

Remember that you now have what you were always digging to find, wrapped your tongue around the sharp edge of destiny and bled down your own body to keep off dehydration.

Remember that you are not a trend-setter, as much as you are a transcender…that your birth was a first because it put steel in a spine that was always bent at the whim of others.

Remember that you forged forward with sheer force of will and refused silence when it might have given you more:

Friends
Money
Prestige
Respect
Dignity

Remember that you threw off all those things in favor of your own endangered truth.

Look in the mirror and remember that you have redefined it. That you broke the glass, slit your own voice with it in order to open it wider. Remember that the mirror thanked you for repurposing its glare into spotlight, reflection into insight.

If you ever forget what no one else knows, remember that it all started with a pencil in your chubby, clumsy fingers, with poems no one wanted to hear, with love no one, including yourself, wanted to feel.

Remember that you took the mud in your eyes and made bricks with it, that you built a pyramid of your life and that you slide down the sides in order to know how to climb back up better, faster, stronger.

And you will.

Remember that you will.

That you dreamed yourself beautiful and forced audiences to agree, challenged them to challenge you to your face with their own discomfort and rage and that, to this day, no one has been able to do it.

Just remember…on dark, cold nights like this when nothing seems to fit and you are too small for your own skin, remember that you remembered how to fill the space.

How getting laced wasn't an option and getting sprung meant tripping wires wrapped around your precious neck…how you laid on the sober ground and held the passage open with fingers frozen with regret.

Remember, dear dark girl, how bright you come on…how you turn on your teeth, tongue your pierced gleam and give the finger to what would worry you into submission.

Remember how you never submit. How you don't give in. How motherfuckers always think they got you when they try to hold you, how their arms tremble cuz you will not give in. How you will cry, scream, rage, twist, throw a fit and thrash like a killer whale wrapped in the careless sail of a drunk pirate…how you will leave blood and fabric floating in the peaceful wake of your devastation.

Remember, girl, black girl, fat, black girl, fat, black, queer, girl, fatblackqueerpoorillegitimategirl…apparently ethnically ambiguous face prettier than the body they claim to love but truly hate…remember you are human first. That you are mammal, animal, species, evolved primate and any of those things, but beyond the beyond…always ALIVE.

Remember that you are alive and what a gift you are to this life, what a triumph over strife that would take lesser men and smaller women and turn them into bushmeat.

Remember. When all your friends have gone wrong and called you crazy, when your lover has found another place to rest their heart, when your family is worried and your colleagues politely distant…remember how you wouldn't let your head full of tears fall into fear that you never knew was there until it was breathing down your neck.

When everyone else has forgotten and you wish you could, but can't forget, remember that every inch of pink meat cracking through, leaving vermillion-stained ice and shreds in feral teeth, pushes fate into the shadow of destiny.