Remember/Reclaim
Remember/Reclaim
Written and performed by Brittany Delaney
Commissioned by RECLAIM
Remember when they used to tell us we were broken?
That the truth we knew about ourselves was fragmented?
That we were lost in a sea of phases
A collection of confusion and wrong turns
Bones just waiting to grow out of this moment and into the boxes and pronouns they demanded we chose to identify ourselves
Do you remember the first time you colored outside of the lines and knew you were crafting a masterpiece of self?
Felt at home amongst the rainbows laying just beyond the sketch?
The moment... there was no going back to life’s paint by numbers game
The moment... the only option was to choose your truth
Do you remember the first time you felt your skin and called it your own?
A reclaiming of sorts
A statement to this world that there are no mistakes in creation
These bodies are our canvas to imagine them as we please
Beauty this deep cannot remain trapped by skin
We are not broken
We are limitless
We are not all over the place
We are expansive
We can’t change the fact that we cover all the ground beneath us
We are soil
We are colorful
We are not made to contort our bodies for others’ lack of flexibility
We were made to grow
We are the entire galaxy and all that it holds
We can’t be written
Out of history when
we helped sketched the blueprints
We are in every color in the wheel
You can keep your closets
We made those beautiful too
We are light and love and water and energy
We cannot be contained or lost
You cannot define us for us
We’ve reclaimed our narrative
Because silence comes with too great of a cost
Life may bend us, but break it will not
When love is the agenda
There is no force great enough to make it stop
We are not broken
There were no mistakes made here
These scars we’ve collected along the journey added texture to our layers that the world wanted us to fear
Do you remember the first time you decided that you could no longer be anything but yourself?
Hold onto that moment
Massage it into your soul
For when you live unapologetically out loud
You give permission to someone else
