why can’t I stop, or the eternal writing of this memoir

When we all went home in 2020, I started working on a memoir.

To get started, I dug through old journals and realized I’d documented much of my teen years, in great detail. The confusion of puberty, my longings for the future, worries about God and page after page of swooning over hot guys I no longer remember.

Five years and a full-on draft and a dozen rejections later, I’m embarking on a huge edit.

It’s necessary I think but I also think I’m somehow reluctant to be done.

To leave this space.

There’s something about staying in here in this time when my sisters and I were teenagers. When we were close, when all we had was each other. We went really hard things together. Poverty, deprivation and abuse and hilarity, a father’s rages and a mother’s near-fatal illness. It’s like I think I can change the outcome somehow if I stay.

I know I can’t. That would be silly. Unrealistic.

But if I stay, if I continue to be patient, I can figure some things out, maybe.

Maybe.