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‘Breonna was writing herself into existence’
There were Post-It notes all over her apartment, according to the New York Times: Goals. To-do lists. Reminders. At 26, Breonna Taylor was in that phase of your life where reinventing yourself is the norm. Where everything about your story is up for revision — a rough draft you’re still workshopping, running it by friends and hoping it makes sense.
We tend to remember people based on who they were when we knew them. As if by the time their lives ended, they’d somehow reached their Final Form, ready to be immortalized as that person forever. But no one is ever finished — especially not a 26-year-old certified EMT, aspiring nurse, and Post-It aficionado — and it’s impossible to know what any of us might become with more time.
“Every one of Breonna’s Post-It notes is a future that we cannot weigh,” writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in a tribute to Taylor’s unfulfilled potential. When Breonna Taylor was killed, we lost her life as we know it — along with infinite realities she was writing into existence.
