The Hands Holding It Have Changed

I opened Twice Opened again.

There is something almost suspiciously fitting about that.

I have been editing lately, although editing feels like too practical a word for what happens when the pages in front of you were written by a version of yourself you can still recognize, but no longer entirely know.

She sounds like me.

Mostly.

There are sentences where I immediately remember the room, the feeling, sometimes even the weather surrounding them. Then there are others that make me stop because I have forgotten what once mattered enough to become a paragraph.

It is strange what the mind keeps.

Stranger still, what it eventually decides it no longer needs to carry.

My first instinct as an editor is to fix things. Tighten this. Remove that. Give an older thought the language I have now.

But somewhere along the way, I realized how unfair that would be.

She didn’t know what I know.

She hadn’t lived the years between her words and my red pen.

And perhaps there is something sacred about allowing an earlier version of ourselves to remain unfinished in the places where she actually was.

So some sentences stay.

Even when I could write them better now.

Some questions remain questions, despite the fact that I have since stumbled into a few of their answers.

Some uncomfortable pieces are allowed to keep their sharp edges.

I don’t want to walk backward through my own history polishing everything until the past sounds wiser than it was.

While we are living a life, there are no chapter titles.

There are days.

Rooms.

People.

Choices that seem insignificant until they aren’t.

Things we survive without realizing we are surviving them.

Years later, we become excellent cartographers. We draw lines between moments, name the mountains, circle the places where everything changed.

But the person walking through them never had the map.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot while editing Twice Opened.

How easily we confuse understanding something now with having understood it then.

How tempting it is to turn memory into a clean narrative once we know where the road eventually went.

I don’t want to do that here.

Instead, I find myself meeting this earlier version of me in the margins.

Sometimes I understand her.

Sometimes I want to interrupt her.

Sometimes I want to tell her something.

Mostly, I keep reading.

There are memories in these pages that once felt enormous, almost architectural, rooms I thought I would live inside forever.

Now I can walk through them without rearranging the furniture.

I can leave again.

Maybe that is why some pieces of the past become harder to remember.

I used to wonder whether forgetting meant something had been buried too deeply. Now I wonder whether some memories simply stop knocking once they have been heard.

Not everything that becomes quiet has disappeared.

Some things have simply finished speaking.

And perhaps that is the strangest part of returning to this manuscript now.

I am doing it while nearly everything around me is changing.

My belongings are packed. Familiar places are becoming places I have visited for the last time without always knowing which time was the last. My life feels scattered between destinations, paperwork, goodbyes, anticipation, and a country waiting on the other side of an ocean.

There is very little about my physical world that feels settled.

Yet somehow, in the middle of all that movement, I have found myself sitting with pages that have been waiting quietly for me.

Maybe books know when they are ready.

Maybe we do too.

Or maybe some things are meant to be opened more than once because the words haven’t changed nearly as much as the hands holding them have.

For now, I am still in the margins.

Reading.

Editing.

Occasionally deleting.

More often, listening.

Twice Opened isn’t ready to leave my hands quite yet.

But for the first time, I think I can see the moment when it will be.