[Intro] I reminisce… I reminisce… [Verse 1] I don't miss the block, I miss the kid who lived there, nine years old, no weight to carry, nothing to prepare, Moms in the kitchen, something frying, radio low, Marley Marl on the tape deck, cutting the static slow — I miss the version of me who didn't know the cost yet, who slept without an agenda, woke up without a checklist, the kid who thought trust was the default, not the exception, before life gave him the curriculum and called it a lesson. I go back there sometimes, not to stay but to remember what it felt like to be open — light — before December started coming every month in a different kind of coat, and I learned that the warmest thing you own is what you wrote. Researchers call it self-continuity — I just call it proof that the boy and the man share something underneath the truth, and every time I go back, I'm not running from the present — I'm checking on a version of myself I need to represent. [Interlude] I reminisce, I reminisce Over you, over you I reminisce… I reminisce… [Verse 2] My cousin Dre used to sit by the window at two, same chair, same look, same conversation running through, about the night things changed, the call he didn't make, the words he should have said before the morning of the wake. He wasn't reminiscing — that's a different thing entirely — he was locked inside a loop that replayed it on a timer, the same unresolved regret on rotation, no conclusion, memory weaponised against him — science calls it rumination. There's a difference between going back to understand and going back because you're trapped and the exit's been banned, between the scar you touch to remember you survived it and the wound you keep reopening just to feel something beside it. Dre moved out eventually. Got quiet. Got still. Said he stopped asking why it happened and started asking until — until what? Until the question stopped having power over morning, until the window was just a window and the night was just the warning. [Interlude] I reminisce, I reminisce Over you, over you I reminisce… I reminisce… [Verse 3] Now I use it differently — pull the past like a map, not to live inside the territory but to close the gap between who I've been and what the present's asking me to be, the memory a compass, not a place I go to flee. I think about my father's hands — the way they worked through silence, never talked about the struggle but showed up with a diligence that I didn't recognise until I had my own decisions, until the weight of Tuesday felt like standing at a crossroads, no permission. I go back there on the hard ones — not for comfort, for instruction, ask myself what he would build here, what he'd cut and what he'd function, and the answer always comes before the doubt has time to settle — the past is not a prison if you enter it with purpose, not to nestle. So when I reminisce I'm not nostalgic — I am studying, converting what I lived into the blueprint for what's coming in, the boy by the radio, Dre at the window, my father's quiet hands — all of them inside this verse right now, helping me to stand. [Outro] I reminisce, I reminisce Over you, over you I reminisce… I reminisce… …over you.
