On Rereading the Weather I Once Wrote

There’s a strange kind of déjà vu that comes from rereading your own work — not the kind where you remember writing it, but the kind where you realize your past self was already speaking truths your present self hadn’t lived yet.

Lately I’ve been revisiting poems I wrote in late 2024, and the experience has been… uncanny. Not prophetic, exactly. More like watching an old storm roll across a landscape you now know by heart. The sky shifts in familiar ways. The pressure drops. The air tastes the same. And you think, How did I not see what was coming?

But that’s the thing about emotional weather:
your subconscious feels the front long before your conscious mind names it.

Those poems weren’t about anyone in particular. They were about the shape of the love I was ready for — the kind that’s earned, not conjured; the kind that asks for depth, not spectacle; the kind that might be temporary but still real enough to leave traces in the soil.

Looking back, I can see the tension in the lines.
The longing.
The caution.
The quiet readiness.
The fear of being left.
The acceptance that even fleeting connection can matter.

I wasn’t predicting the future.
I was describing the architecture of my own heart — the way I love, the way I protect, the way I brace for loss without closing myself off from meaning.

It’s odd, reading those pieces now.
Odd, but also grounding.

It reminds me that my voice has always known things before I did.
That my writing has always been a barometer.
That the storms I walk through don’t arrive unannounced — I just don’t always listen to the wind until it’s already shifting.

So this isn’t a poem.
Just a note from the present Rowan to the past one:

You weren’t wrong.
You weren’t naïve.
You were already reading the weather.

And you were right to write it down.