All of The Women Before Me

(A letter carried in bone, breath, and memory)

I feel you.

Even when the world is quiet,

I hear your footsteps inside my chest.

I carry you..

all of you...

like embers pressed beneath my ribs,

burning soft, steady,

refusing to fade.

To the women who came before me,

who endured so I could stand here:

I am both your survival

and your rebellion.

I am the silence you were forced to keep,

but I am also the voice you were never allowed to use.

Your blood became rivers

and I learned to swim upstream,

even when the current wanted to pull me under.

I carry Moroccan winds in my lungs,

the salt of desert heat

mixed with the cool breath of distant tides.

I feel the Lenape rivers move beneath my skin,

the Manahoac roots curling deep in my bones,

the Haudenosaunee earth holding steady beneath my feet.

There are Portuguese waves that rise in my chest,

Welsh hillsides stitched into the quiet of my breath.

You gave me all of this

a thousand landscapes,

a thousand names,

a thousand ways to belong

and to never belong at all.

I used to think this made me fractured,

but now I know:

I was made to carry many worlds.

And to the women whose names history forgot...

the ones who stitched strength into the edges of their skirts,

who made ribbon skirts heavy with memory,

each thread carrying prayer,

each color carrying story.

You who softened hides with your hands,

turning beaver and deer

into clothing warm enough to outlast winter,

who wrapped your children in furs,

not for vanity,

but for survival,

for love,

for protection against a world

that gave little and took much.

I feel you in the patience of those stitches,

in the rhythm of scraping, tanning, sewing,

in the quiet ceremony of making

from what the land provided.

I have seen you in the mirror.

I have felt you in the rooms where I do not fit.

I have worn your ache like a second skin

and shaped it into something you’d recognize:

a body that refuses to be small,

a voice that does not bow to shame.

To the women who endured heartbreak,

whose longing became a quiet hunger:

I have tasted it, too.

I have known the weight of empty rooms,

the ache of words unsaid,

the sting of being seen only in pieces.

But I have also learned to build beauty from that ache 

perfumes steeped in memory,

poems pressed into paper like veins,

jewelry carved from stone and story,

baking warmth into boxes meant to heal

what the world tried to fracture.

Every creation is a prayer.

Every scent, every page,

every fragile handmade thing

is how I keep you alive in me.

And to the women who knew faith

like breath 

I’ve come to understand you too.

There is a kind of strength

that isn’t loud,

that isn’t seen,

but roots itself deep in surrender.

I have walked into shadows

with trembling knees

and called Jehovah’s name into the silence.

I have felt His stillness wrap around my chaos,

and I know this is the same whisper

that held you when no one else did.

You have made me into many things:

a woman who bends but does not break,

who loves fiercely yet guards her spirit, who gathers broken glass

and makes it shine again.

There is grit in my veins

and softness stitched into my palms.

You gave me both.

If anyone asks how I stand here today...

I will not speak.

I will open my hands instead..

show them the calluses,

show them the fire,

show them the roots tangled deep in soil older than my name.

Because I am not one woman.

I am every woman who came before me, every woman who walks beside me, and every woman who will rise after me.

You are my marrow.

You are my breath.

You are the quiet thunder in my chest

that will never stop burning.