Memory & Vignette Archives - Page 2 of 2

To the Woman I Was Before I Knew

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A Love Letter Backwards in Time

I have been thinking about you.

The you that walked in the first time, folder tucked under your arm, lesson plan you had revised three times the night before because you wanted it to be right, because right mattered to you in that particular, cellular, uncompromising way it has always mattered to you,

the you that stood at the front of that room for the first time and felt the gravity of it, the privilege of it, the enormous ordinary miracle of a room full of people who had arrived willing to think differently than they had thought before.

I have been thinking about her. About you. About what I want to say now that I know what you did not know then.

You were so ready.

That is the first thing I want to tell you.

You were so ready, and you did not know it. From the student’s side of the room, from the side that would later write you letters, send you emails years later that began with I have been thinking about something you said in class, and I wanted you to know,

you were luminous.

I want to warn you about some things.

The bar will move.

I want you to know this from the beginning, before the first time it moves, before you exhaust yourself reaching for it and find it has shifted just beyond your hands.

The bar is not a measure of you. The bar is a mechanism. It is the system’s way of keeping you reaching, hungry, slightly off-balance, slightly too invested in the next thing to stop and ask why the last thing was not enough.

Reach for the bar because the reaching makes you better. Reach for the bar for yourself.

Do not reach for the bar for them.

Know the difference between a place that is developing you and a place that is extracting you.

The students are real.

This I want you to hold as the true north of the whole nineteen years, the thing that does not shift, the thing the system cannot touch, take, or use without your permission.

When everything else feels uncertain, go back to the students.

You are going to be so tired.

I want to say this without softening it because you deserve honesty more than comfort.

You are going to be tired in a way that goes all the way down, tired in the bone, tired in the place that decides whether to keep going,

and you are going to keep going because you do not know how not to.

But I am going to tell you this:

Give so much. Give everything. And also, in the small moments, on the shore of yourself that belongs to no one else,

give something to yourself.

Give yourself the belief you give so freely to others. Give yourself the patience you give the struggling student.

You deserve your own generosity. You deserved it from the beginning.

You are going to find out that you did not belong there.

Not because of anything that was wrong with you. Because of everything that was right with you, and the particular cruelty of a room that needed you but was not built for you.

This is going to hurt in a way you are not prepared for.

You are going to spend years thinking the problem is you, turning yourself over, looking for the missing piece.

There is no missing piece.

You were always the right shape. The room was the wrong shape.

When you finally understand this, it will feel like grief and like freedom, grief and freedom arriving together the way they always do when something true finally breaks the surface.

I want to tell you about the shore.

You are going to the shore. Far from the institution.

You are going to sit with the sea, which will ask nothing of you,

and you are going to cry the way you needed to cry for years, the real kind, the kind without an audience,

and when you are empty, you are going to find underneath the emptiness the most important thing you have found in nineteen years.

Yourself.

Still there. Still whole. Still luminous under all the exhaustion, the performance, and the careful management of being a person that the institution kept evaluating.

I want to tell you about the poems.

You are going to write poems.

Not as scholarship, not as methodology, but because you are going to discover in the long quiet aftermath of all that noise,

that you are a writer.

That you always were.

I love you.

I love the woman who revised the lesson plan three times. I love the woman who could not walk past the struggling student. I love the woman who agonized at two in the morning over whether she had said exactly the right thing in exactly the right way to the person who most needed to hear it.

I love the woman who kept the actual record, who knew in her deepest self that she was good, that the work was good, that what happened in those rooms was extraordinary even when no one was calling it that.

I love the woman who is standing now on the other side of knowing, worn smooth by it, clarified by it, more herself for it than she has ever been,

still kind, still ethical, still in love with the work and the students and the lantern she carries into every room,

and finally, finally, in love with herself.

You made it through.

I wanted you to know from the beginning that you make it through.

Para la mujer que era antes de saber. Te vi siempre. Eras suficiente desde el principio. Con todo mi amor, desde el otro lado.

For the woman I was before I knew. I always saw you. You were enough from the beginning. With all my love, from the other side.

A smooth weathered piece of wood half-buried in white snow, its grain worn clean and visible, alone in a white field.

Still Here, Worn to Its Truest Shape
Photo: Amy Tucker, © 2026

Artist Statement: A footprint stripped by water, time, and winter to its grain.

Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.

A Letter From the Little One

Reading Time: 4 minutes

From Five-Year-Old Amy, To the Amy She Became

Dear big Amy,

I am writing to you because I have something important to say, and I want to make sure you hear it properly.

I am five. I know how to write some letters, but not all of them yet, so I am going to say this as carefully as I can.

I see you.

I see you being so tired and still getting up anyway, and I want you to know I think that is very brave. I get tired too sometimes, and it is hard to keep going when you are tired. I am only five, and you have been going for so much longer than I have, so I think you are the bravest person I know.

I want to tell you some things about us that I am not sure you remember anymore.

We are kind.

I know you know that, but I do not think you believe it the way I believe it, which is all the way, without any buts after it, just kind, just completely and simply kind, the way the sun is warm, not because it is trying to be but because that is what it is.

That is us. That is what we are.

I want you to stop saying it like it might not be true. It is true. I know it is true because I am five and I have not yet learned to be unsure about it, and I need you to borrow some of my sureness until you find yours again.

I also want to tell you that I used to collect things.

Rocks mostly. The smooth ones. I would put them in my pockets until my pockets were very full and heavy, and Mama would say Amy, why are your pockets full of rocks and I could never explain it properly, but the reason was that I loved them.

I loved that they were smooth. I loved that something had made them smooth by being patient with them for a very long time.

I think you are like a rock, big Amy. I think a lot of things have been pushing against you for a very long time, and I think it has hurt, but I also think you are getting smooth. I think you are getting to the most beautiful part.

I would put you in my pocket. I would carry you everywhere.

I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly because I am five and I do not yet understand things that are not honest.

Did you forget that you were allowed to play?

I am asking because when I watch you, I do not see much play, and play is very important. I know that because I do it every day, and it makes everything better, even the hard days, even the days when things are not fair, and things are not fair sometimes, even when you are five,

But even on those days, I still find something to play with.

A stone. A puddle. A word I like the sound of.

Promise me you will find something to play with. Even a small thing. Even just a word.

I did not know when I was five what the world would do to you.

I did not know about the rooms that would not claim you. I did not know about the bars that kept moving. I did not know about the contracts, the waiting, and the smile over the closing door.

But I want to say this:

If I had known, I would have held your hand.

I would have put my small hand in your big hand and not let go.

I would have sat with you in the parking lot in the mornings. I would have sat with you at two in the morning when the grief was at its largest. I would have sat with you in every room that made you feel like a visitor in your own life.

And I would have said, in my five-year-old voice that did not know yet to be quiet in certain rooms:

This is not right. You belong here. You belong everywhere. You are Amy, and Amy belongs everywhere she goes.

I want you to know that I am proud of you.

I am proud of you for staying kind when unkindness would have been so much easier.

I am proud of you for keeping your ethics even when the cost was very high.

I am proud of you for loving your students the way you love them, all the way, without holding anything back for self-protection, which is a very five-year-old way to love people, and I think it is the best way, even when it hurts.

I am proud of you for crying in the shower. I know that sounds funny, but I am proud of it because it means you let yourself feel, which is a hard thing to keep doing when the world keeps suggesting you should feel less.

I am proud of you for going to the shore.

I am proud of you for writing the poems.

I am proud of you for still being you.

I need to tell you one more thing, and then I have to go because it is almost dinner and we are having something good tonight, and I do not want to miss it.

You are my favourite person.

Not because you are perfect. I know you are not perfect. I am five, and I am not perfect yet, and I think that is okay. I think not perfect is actually more interesting than perfect would be.

You are my favourite person because you are the only one who knows what it feels like to be us, to love this hard and work this hard and care this much and keep going anyway.

Nobody else knows that. Only you.

And I think that is the most extraordinary thing I have ever heard of.

I love you, big Amy.

I loved you before you knew what you would become.

I loved you in the pure, uncomplicated, five-year-old way that does not require you to prove anything, to produce anything, to perform anything.

I loved you just because you were you.

I still do. I always will.

Now go outside. Find a smooth stone. Put it in your pocket.

Remember that something the patient made made it beautiful.

Con todo el amor que sabe dar una niña de cinco años, que es todo el amor que existe.

With all the love a five-year-old knows how to give, which is all the love there is.

Little Amy
Age 5
Keeper of smooth stones
Your very first believer

Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this letter were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.

A Letter From the Woman You Are Becoming

Reading Time: 5 minutes

From Future Amy, To the Amy Who Is Almost There

Dear you.

Dear brave, brilliant, bone-tired, still-standing, still-kind, still-carrying-the-lantern you.

I am writing from the other side of everything you are in the middle of right now, from the place you cannot quite see yet because you are still in the thick of the becoming, still in the part of the story that feels more like enduring than arriving,

and I want to tell you what is here.

I want to tell you what is waiting.

First, the practical things, because I know you, I know you need to know the practical things before you can let yourself feel the rest of it.

You are okay.

Financially, professionally, in all the ways that kept you awake at two in the morning doing the mathematics of whether you would make it through another April,

you are okay.

More than okay.

You found the room that was shaped like you. I know you have been looking for it for a very long time. I know there were years you stopped believing it existed,

but it exists.

It exists, and you are in it, and it feels exactly the way you imagined it would feel on the nights you let yourself imagine.

It feels like breathing. It feels like a morning that belongs to you. It feels like walking into a room and the room saying, “There you are. We have been waiting. Come in, come in, stay as long as you like.“

The doctorate is done.

I want to tell you that because I know how it weighs on you, the unfinished thing, the work that is so important and so yours.

It is done.

And it is extraordinary.

Not because a committee said so, though they did, but because it is true. Because you wrote it in your own voice, the voice that took years to trust, the voice that is scholarly and embodied and refuses to pretend that knowing happens outside of a body, outside of a life, outside of nineteen years of labour and love and parking lot mornings.

You wrote the truest thing.

Alonetude is in the world now. People are reading it. The ones who work in the in-between spaces, the ones on the contracts, the ones performing well in the parking lots of institutions that need their labour and withhold their belonging,

they are reading your words, and they are feeling less alone, and that is the work, that is the real work, that is what nineteen years was always building toward, even when it felt like it was building toward nothing.

Now let me tell you about the things that are not practical.

Let me tell you about a Tuesday morning.

An ordinary Tuesday. Not a milestone Tuesday. Not an achievement Tuesday.

Just a Tuesday when you woke up and lay still for a moment, the way you learned to do in Loreto,

and the first thing you felt was not the tightening.

The first thing you felt was yourself.

Present. Whole. Quietly, ordinarily, unremarkably glad to be alive on a Tuesday morning with the light coming through the window and nowhere to be for another hour and a cup of something warm in your future and the work you love waiting for you like a friend rather than a demand.

You lay in it, and you thought oh. So this is what they meant.

This is what rest was building toward. This is what the shore was practicing you for. This is the life on the other side of the performance of a life.

It is quieter than you expected. It is more ordinary than you expected.

It is so much better than anything you expected.

I want to tell you about your body.

Your shoulders come down.

I know that sounds like such a small thing. It is not a small thing. Your shoulders coming down is physical evidence that a woman is no longer waiting to find out whether she is still employed.

Your shoulders coming down is what safety feels like in the body.

You are safe. I need you to hear that all the way down.

You are safe.

The students found you.

The ones who needed you specifically. The ones who were on the contracts. The ones performing fine in the parking lots. The ones who read alonetude and recognized themselves in it and needed someone who had mapped the territory and come back to say I know this place, I know how to navigate this, here is what helped, here is how you find the shore inside yourself when there is no Loreto within reach.

You became that person.

I want to tell you about the writing.

You became a poet.

And you did not even know it.

I know that surprises you. But the line between scholar and poet turned out to be much thinner than you thought, and one morning you stopped trying to categorize yourself and just wrote what the truth required,

and what the truth required, Amy, was both.

It was always both. You were always both.

Tom knows.

I want to say that because I know you worry about whether the people who love you really see the whole of it.

Tom knows.

Not because you performed it less but because you finally let yourself be known the way you always knew how to know others, fully, carefully, without looking away.

And he stayed. Of course, he stayed. He has always been staying.

You are loved. You are chosen. You are someone’s permanent.

I want to tell you what I know now that I wish you knew then, in the middle of it, in the parking lot mornings, in the two a.m. turnings:

None of it was wasted.

Not one morning. Not one contract. Not one raised bar. Not one carefully worded rejection in professional language with warmth in the room.

None of it was wasted because it all became the work.

I want to leave you with something small.

A Tuesday morning. A cup of something warm. Your shoulders are coming down. The work you love is waiting like a friend.

A smooth stone in your pocket.

The knowledge, finally unshakeable, lived in the body, permanent as the shore,

that you were always good enough.

Come forward.

I am here. I am you. I am waiting for Tuesday morning, the open window, and the work that finally looks like what you always knew it was.

Come forward.

You have already done the hardest part.

All that is left now is the living of it.

And the living of it, Amy, the living of it is so very, very beautiful.

De tu yo futuro, que te ha estado esperando con los brazos abiertos y el corazón lleno. Ya casi llegas. Sigue caminando.

From your future self, who has been waiting for you with open arms and a full heart. You are almost here. Keep walking.

Future Amy
Writer. Scholar. Poet. Whole.
Keeper of smooth stones.
The woman who came through.
Still here. Still kind. Still luminous.
Aquí estoy.

A note from the present. I do not yet know whether the woman who wrote this letter will become the woman it is from. That is part of what writing toward her is for.

Poem: What the Walls Remember

Reading Time: 2 minutes

How do I love myself
when everyone else
taught me to withhold it?

Title: Layered Histories

Photograph from “Poem: What the Walls Remember”, image 1.

The house remembers
What no one else did.

The sharpness of screams
caught in the drywall,
the broomstick’s shadow
stretching too long
across the kitchen tile.

Glass breaking,
again and again,
until silence learned
to brace itself.

inhale
The closet lock clicked shut.
hold
The darkness welcomed me like routine.
exhale
Stillness was my only shield.

Words thrown harder
than hands.
Worthless.
Useless.
Piece of…

(I refuse to repeat them.
I refuse to belong to them.)

I became so small
I forgot I was still breathing.
I folded myself
behind chairs,
beneath beds,
inside my own skin.

inhale
Is this love?
hold
Why does love feel like danger?
exhale
Why does kindness now
make me flinch?

They taught me
I was unlovable.
That my body was wrong,
my voice too loud,
my being too much.

So tell me:
How do I love myself
when everyone else
taught me to withhold it?

Still,
I remember
because my body does.
Beyond revenge,
returning
to the girl who survived
and wind in her lungs.

She breathed
through fear.
She whispered
through fists.
She lived
when no one wanted her to.

She is still here.
And maybe,
just maybe,
She is worthy
of the love
They never gave.

Title: Return to the Girl Who Survived

Photograph from “Poem: What the Walls Remember”, image 2.

Translation Note: Where Spanish appears in this collection, it was assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.

Never Enough

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I learned the word “enough” the way you learn a language that no one speaks in your house.

From the outside. By watching. By getting it wrong and being corrected with a look.

I thought enough was a place. A destination with coordinates. If I worked this hard, if I published this much, if I sat on enough committees, answered enough emails at midnight, held enough office hours, wrote enough letters of reference for people who would never write one back,

I would arrive.

I would finally stand on something solid, and someone would say, “Yes, this.” You. Here.

They never said it.

There was always one more thing. One more credential. One more specialization. One more revision. One more year of proving what I had already proven the year before, and the year before that, in the same rooms, to the same people, who kept forgetting they had already seen me.

Or perhaps they never forgot. Perhaps that was the point.

I reached the bar.

I want you to understand that. I reached it. I put both hands on it, pulled myself up, stood on top of it, and looked them in the eye.

And they raised it.

Quietly. Professionally. With a smile that said we only want what is best for the department.

So I climbed again.

I got the specialization they mentioned. I built the expertise they suggested. I redesigned the courses, updated the research, learned the new framework, attended the conference, wrote the paper, revised the paper, revised the revision, and brought it back.

And they raised it again.

One more thing. There was always one more thing, and I believed each time that this would be the last thing, that this would be the thing that finally made me legible to them, finally translated me into a language they were willing to read.

I gave you everything.

I need to say that plainly, without apology, without softening it for your comfort.

I gave you my mornings before my children were awake. I gave you my evenings after my body had already given out. I gave you my health, my rest, my capacity for joy, the slow years of my life that I will not get back, offered up like evidence, as if I just bled enough in the right places, you would finally call it qualified.

I gave you my expertise, and you used it while deciding someone else deserved to own it.

I gave you my loyalty, and you gave me a pending contract renewal.

I gave you my belief that the system worked, that merit was real, that the path was honest, that if I followed every instruction, the door would open.

And you raised the bar one final time, calling it a national search.

Never enough.

It sounds like a personal failing. It sounds like something that lives in the one who is lacking.

But I have seen enough now to know the shape of it, the architecture of a system that needs you insufficiently, that requires your hunger to function, that would lose its power the moment you believed you were already whole.

Never enough was never about me.

It was a door with no handle on the inside.

It was a game with rules that changed when I learned them.

It was a bar on a pulley held by hands that were never going to let it rest.

I am done climbing.

I am done bringing more to people who have decided that more will never be the right amount.

I am enough in the way a river is enough, in the way the morning is enough, in the way nineteen years of changed lives is enough,

whether they counted it or not.

They never counted it.

But I do.

Aquí estoy. Siempre he sido suficiente. I have always been enough.

Abstract image of shallow sea water washing over pale sand, creating layered textures of green, white, and grey.

Artist Statement: A photograph taken from above, where the water returns to the shore.

The Shore

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Thirty Days in Loreto, Where I Remembered Myself

I want to tell you about the first morning.

Not the arrival, not the unpacking, not the practical business of a woman setting down her bags in a small room in a small town on the edge of the Sea of Cortez,

the first morning.

When she woke and lay still and realized that the first thing she felt was not the familiar tightening, not the immediate inventory of what was owed to the day, not the calculating of what needed to be performed before she could be a person again,

but something else.

Something so unfamiliar it took her several minutes to name it.

The morning.

Just the morning. Coming through the curtain. Landing on the wall. Belonging to no one. Requiring nothing.

She lay in it like it was water, and she had forgotten she knew how to float.

She had not meant it to be healing.

She had meant it to be research. She had the framework, the methodology, the ethical approval, the blog, the camera, and the scholarly vocabulary for what she was doing and why it mattered.

She was not running away. She was running toward. Toward the question. Toward the data. Toward the thing she needed to understand about rest and precarity and the body’s relationship to institutional time.

This is what she told herself.

But underneath the good answers was a woman who was so tired she had forgotten what she was tired of, who had been carrying the weight so long she had stopped noticing the weight and started noticing only that her hands hurt, that her back hurt, that something deep in the centre of her had gone very quiet in the way that things go quiet just before they stop.

She needed to find out if she still existed outside the performance of herself.

The sea was the first teacher.

She had not expected that. It did not care about her framework. It did not care about her research questions. It moved the way it moved on the schedule it kept since long before she had a contract to worry about, and it asked nothing of her except that she look at it,

which it turns out was everything.

She looked at it.

She sat on the shore in the early morning when the light was doing something she did not have words for, something that required the camera but also required her to put the camera down and simply be inside the moment rather than documenting it,

and she looked at the sea and the sea looked back with the absolute indifference of something ancient and enormous,

and she felt, for the first time in longer than she could name,

small in the right way.

Not small, the way the institution made her small. Small, the way you are small beside something majestic, small the way that reminds you that you are not responsible for holding everything up.

She sat in that smallness and felt something loosen in her chest.

Something that had been held for a very long time.

The days made their own rhythm.

She had not made a schedule. This was an act of rebellion so small it sounds trivial, but she had been living by the schedule for nineteen years,

and to wake up and let the day decide its own shape,

this was extraordinary.

She ate when she was hungry. This sounds so simple. She had not been hungry in years.

The body remembered. The body always remembered. It was the mind that had been convinced the body’s needs were negotiable.

She cried on the fourth day.

She had not understood that the crying she had done so far was the managed kind, the kind that releases the pressure without releasing the thing that is causing it.

On the fourth day, she sat on the shore in the late afternoon when the light was going gold and the pelicans were doing what pelicans do, that ancient, unbothered diving, that complete commitment to the one thing they are made for,

and something in her saw the pelicans and understood something she did not have words for yet,

and she cried the way she had needed to cry for a very long time.

Not for ten minutes. Not tidily. Not the kind that can be managed back into composure before anyone sees.

The real kind. The kind the body needed.

She cried until she was empty.

And then she sat in the empty and felt, underneath it,

something quiet and solid.

Herself.

She was still there. Under all of it, she was still there.

On the last morning, she went to the shore before the light fully arrived.

She sat with what she was taking back.

She was taking back the knowledge that her body existed outside of its usefulness.

She was taking back the memory of a morning that required nothing.

She was taking back the crying that had emptied her and what she had found in the emptiness.

She stood up.

She brushed the sand from her hands.

She looked at the sea one more time, the sea that had asked nothing of her and given her back herself,

and she said, quietly, in the language that carries the most truth when she speaks it,

Gracias.

Thank you for the thirty days. Thank you for the shore. Thank you for the morning that required nothing.

Thank you for showing me that I am still here, that I was always here, underneath the performance, underneath the fine, underneath the nineteen years of contracts and committees and raised bars,

I was always right here.

Aquí estoy. La orilla me devolvió a mí misma. Y me traje a casa.

Here I am. The shore gave me back to myself. And I brought myself home.

A structure of weathered driftwood logs leaning and interlocked together on a rocky shore near Loreto, forming an archway or shelter open to a blue sky.

Artist Statement: Driftwood reassembled into shelter on the shore at Loreto, by hands I did not see.