I found my old blog.
I say found, because when I typed ‘ugandanchic.wordpress.com’ into my phone, I did not actually expect that words I had written years ago, would come back to me. It felt nostalgic. Is that the word you would use, to describe being reminded of parts of you. Nostalgic in the sense of taking you back to a time of past lives. You know, to okwijuka of sorts. a remembrance if you will.
Anyway, I found my old blog, and after months of promises to myself that I’d start again; writing firstly for me, and then sharing with you, I got the kick I needed. So here I am, inspired by finding old pieces of myself, which I believed to have been long swallowed up by the internet, or more accurately, a delete button I was convinced I had hit.
In the beginning I wrote, and here I am writing again.
Five years. That’s how long since I thought I had lost my last blog, since I stopped writing-writing. It’s difficult to explain, because I have written since then, as I could never really stop writing. But still, not like this. Not with the stirs finding my old words reminded me of. I don’t remember why I stopped exactly. Perhaps it doesn’t still matter now that I have found it again.
Back to the now.
I want to write today about which versions of us survive. Who of us emerges when the dust of the times settles, and you still find yourself standing. I want to write in remembrance of and, also in reclamation. That is the process that comes with grief and survival. It’s perhaps what June Jordan meant in some way when she said, “some of us did not die”. The question that I sit with and now pose to you, is, so where do we go from here?
What now, that we are here? A fitting question perhaps, in the midst of what feels like burning and collapsing. Where do we go from here? To whom do we turn, if not to each other? We are all surviving, or running, or both. The lines on our faces are a shared collection of what we are running, surviving from. It is perhaps our collective understanding of this that will get us through.
This is what I am banking on. That as the words come back to me, and I share with you, that you too will remember. That if we understand that the violences that surround us, and now seem almost indistinguishable from who we are. that if we understand them to be connected, but not innate, and that they do not have to be us. that if we understand that, then we will survive them, and perhaps even save each other.
And so, again I ask, where we go from here?
I don’t know, but words have been flowing back to me, so I imagine that it is a sign that we can be all sorts of glorious, again. That now that we are still here, we can still be here.
I am writing again, and I think that too comes with parts of grief. I never thought that grieving of any sort could make you softer, but it does. For such a long time, it just feels like the ache in your throat that makes it hard to breathe. or the feeling in the pit of your stomach that causes you to hunch your shoulders and not hope too loudly. And then, it finally settles, and words return.
So, when I ask, where do we go from here, I am really asking about which you has or will survive, and how you remember them. and then move forward or perhaps more accurately, alongside and in togetherness of sorts with them, and me, and each other.
What comes after?
When the dust has settled; and you are still here, in a sometimes altered but still, you version of self.
Those are the questions that finding my old self leaves me with, and so now I ask you,
which of you, will emerge from the rubble?
and where will that lead you?