To Be Remembered by Myself

A plea to exist fully in a life that keeps forgetting you.

I forget so much.

The days collapse behind me,

folding in on themselves

like waves erasing footprints.

I move through routines my body recalls

while my mind stays blank-

a ghost walking familiar paths.

I move forward only because my body knows how

-

the rest of me is guessing.

Somewhere, there are versions of me

who laughed until they cried,

who made promises and meant them,

who felt something bright and alive.

But I can’t reach them anymore.

They are ghosts living in rooms

I’ve been locked out of.

Sometimes it feels like something else

is living my life when I’m not looking-

breathing my air,

touching the things I love,

signing their name beside mine

in handwriting I almost recognize.

Sometimes it feels like I’m watching my life

through a window fogged with years.

The faces are familiar,

but the feelings never come back.

Someone else was there in my place,

loving the people I love.

They paint my life in my absence-

using my colors, my brush,

but leaving their own signature in the corner.

When I return, the canvas is still warm,

and I can’t tell what parts were mine.

I scroll through evidence of existence-

photos, words, scribbles in a notebook-

each one a relic,

a fragment of a person I used to be.

My memories feel borrowed,

like I’m studying the artifacts 

of a stranger’s life.

My past is scattered across hands I can’t see.

People tell me stories about things I’ve done,

and I nod,

like an artist pretending to recognize their own work.

I stare at pictures of myself

like they’re strangers I’ve lost.

Who took this? Why was I smiling?

What noise was being made in that moment,

what did I think was worth remembering?

I want to ask her - the girl in the frame-

what it felt like to be alive that day.

I want to remember my childhood,

not as fragments or stories retold to me,

but in color and sound,

in the heartbeat if it.

I want to know what I loved.

What made me cry.

What kind of person I was becoming

before I forgot how to be her.

I don’t want to exist like a sketch-

half-drawn, half-known,

always in progress,

lines fading each time I return to the page.

I want to be filled in again,

to remember the colors I used to carry.

To know what it felt like to laugh and mean it.

To hold a memory that doesn’t dissolve 

under my touch.

Sometimes I wonder who’s holding the pencil now-

who shades the moments I’ll never recall,

who lives in the moments that used to be mine,

who laughs through my mouth

when I am gone.

Even love disappears into fog.

I know I had days with my family;

I know we smiled.

I know they laughed,

and I must have laughed too.

But the memory has already dissolved,

leaving only the echo of warmth

and the ache of not being there

when it was mine to keep.

Who am I,

if I am never all at once?

If my name belongs to many

and my story keeps rewriting itself in the dark?

Who am I, 

if I’m always becoming and never being?

If my outlines never meet,

and my name is written in many hands?

I am desperate to remember.

Not just moments,

not just days,

but myself.

The pulse beneath them

the proof I was ever whole.

The one who lived and loved

and made art out of being.

The one who could finish the drawing

without losing her shape.

I am left with routine-

muscle memory,

breadcrumbs,

the vague hum of existence.

Every day, I am reborn without a past,

mourning a life I’m still living.

I wish I remembered

what it felt like to remember.

-Koii