The Stories Beneath My Skin

There was a time I thought memories came from stories passed down,

but these didn’t feel passed down.

They came raw. Alive. Like breath held too long.

Like a room you walk into and already know where everything sits,

even though you’ve never stepped foot in it before.

When I was nine, I began to feel it.

Not just see it in dreams—but live it.

I ran with bare feet across red plains,

the wind sharp in my lungs,

the taste of dust thick and old,

the sound of mourning behind me—not taught, just known.

I knew how to move through that land.

My feet carried memory like instinct.

The fear in my chest wasn’t fear of dreams—it was real.

And when I woke up, I remembered everything:

the smell of sweat, the press of earth,

the dry crack of footsteps behind me.

Like I had run that path before. Maybe I had.

In other dreams, I was taken across water.

Not as passenger, not as guest.

I was chained.

Laughed at.

Food thrown.

My skin labeled wrong. My voice unwelcome.

I remember the rocking of the ship beneath me,

the rot in the air, the weight of metal biting bone.

I remember dying.

Once in fire.

Once in water—held down, not drowned, but erased.

Again and again, I woke with my chest burning,

my arms aching as if they had truly fought back.

No one needed to tell me those were not just dreams.

At seventeen, I walked through Carolina mud and Creole brick,

a girl with no place to land.

Too red to be white, too white to be safe,

too brown to be understood.

We weren’t slaves. But we weren’t free.

My family and I moved like fog,

our stories unrecorded, our presence tolerated, never welcomed.

I remember the scratch of rough fabric on my wrists,

the way eyes followed but didn’t see us.

I remember the cane fields, the ink-stained hands,

the way drought split the land wide open like a warning.

Even the rivers we trusted dried up with grief.

But somehow—my heart kept flowing.

One night I was under water again,

not swimming, not sinking—just being held there.

Punished for the color that lived on my skin like it chose me.

Another dream came fast behind it:

a beating not for crime,

but for being too much of too many things.

That red-white-brown skin was too loud for comfort.

Too mixed for belonging.

But even then, bruised and breathless,

I could feel something inside me rise.

Not spirit. Not ghost.

Just a truth that refused to be buried.

People ask me if I believe in reincarnation.

I don’t.

Do I believe in hauntings? Curses? No.

But I know what it feels like to stand somewhere

and feel your bones hum with knowing.

I know what it means to dream in full taste and texture,

to wake up with your jaw clenched around a name you never learned,

but somehow still remember.

My Indigenous roots taught me dreams are not random.

They’re a language.

A direction. A breath from the past guiding the present.

My White blood called them shameful. Dangerous.

As if knowing too much about yourself

might undo what you were told to believe.

But I don’t live for their understanding anymore.

I am not haunted. I’m not chosen.

I am simply walking—with all my pieces intact.

Indigenous, white, survivor, warrior.

Not a half-being, not a question mark,

but a whole story—still being written.

If I dream,

it is not to escape.

It is to remind myself:

I am still here.

And what the blood remembers—

it remembers for a reason.