Flashback Friday: Recursive Text [Narrated]

From essay to poem to sonnet to self.

Last week, I wrote about snow.
About the boy who didn’t let go.
About silence that stuck to skin like cold.

That story became a poem.
The poem became a sonnet.
Same thread—pulled tighter with each stitch.

It didn’t want to resolve.
It listened. Compressed. Waited.

The rope’s still in my hand.
But this time, I get to decide why.

Recursive Text

Not all that shaped me ever spoke aloud;
Some truths arrived in silence, sharp and near—
A look withdrawn, a nod that disallowed,
A warmth withheld, a smile that drew too near.

I learned to vanish while I wore a grin,
To bend my voice to fit a safer tone.
They called it strength—this vigilance within—
But praised a mask I never chose to own.

The weight I carried passed as something earned,
A second spine of shame I named as pride.
I made my flesh obedient and burned
The parts that once rebelled or asked or cried.

I speak—but still forget to breathe between,
Unbecoming all they said I had to mean.

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This piece is recursive in more than form.

It began as Chicken Run—a funny memory of a frozen field and a sled that didn’t stop. That essay was stripped down into Everything Was White Until It Wasn’t, a flashback on inherited silence.
That memory shaped Unbecoming, a poem about what we carry without knowing.
This sonnet is its final compression—
distilled, unresolved, still holding the thread.

Call it recursive.
Call it memory.
Call it practice.