Sometimes I think about how memory feels less like a photo album and more like a loose pile of Polaroids in a shoebox. The other night, I was sitting on my couch, half-watching a rerun, and this one memory slipped in—quiet, but persistent. I remembered the way my grandma’s hands looked when she shelled peas, her fingers quick and gentle, the soft click of each pod. Nothing dramatic, just a moment I’d forgotten I was carrying.
I didn’t plan to write about it. I wasn’t even planning to write at all. But somehow, a line arrived before I had a chance to think it through. It showed up in my notes app, clumsy and honest: “Her hands made green things tender.” I stared at it for a minute. It felt too simple at first, like it couldn’t possibly mean anything. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized my body had known what I needed to say before my mind caught up.
Maybe that’s how being Black and queer creeps into my writing—quiet, stubborn, half-hidden in the details. There’s a certain softness I let myself have on the page that I don’t always show in the world. I don’t have to explain what the hands mean, or why tender feels brave to me. I just let it exist. Sometimes I laugh at myself for being sentimental about vegetables, but I guess that’s part of it too. The messiness, the awkward lines, the small, surprising tenderness.
So that’s what I’m sitting with today. Not a big revelation, just this: memory nudges, the body listens, and sometimes a line shows up that feels like home. There’s a quiet kind of magic in letting it be enough.