They told us
history was stone.
Cold.
Fixed.
Carved by careful hands.
But history was never stone.
It was breath held behind closed teeth.
Ink smudged by tired fingers.
A name hidden in the margin
because the page belonged to someone else.
It was women
writing themselves sideways into the record.
A spiral in the corner of a notebook.
A recipe that was really a warning.
A hymn carrying directions to safety.
A thread stitched red through grey cloth.
A footnote refusing to disappear.
They called us emotional
when we remembered too much.
Hysterical
when we noticed the pattern.
Difficult
when we refused to forget ourselves.
Still, we kept recording.
On scraps of paper.
On skin.
On kitchen walls.
In archives that smelled of dust and rain.
In the trembling space between speaking
and being silenced.
Because memory is not passive.
It is resistance.
And every woman who said
No, that is not what happened,
left a door cracked open for the next one.
The next reader.
The next witness.
The next voice brave enough to write her own name
before someone else erased it.
Listen carefully.
You can still hear them.
In libraries.
In classrooms.
In code.
In songs.
In the hush before a woman finally decides
she will not make herself smaller anymore.
The archive does not sleep.
It waits.
And somewhere, even now,
another hand is drawing the spiral
in the margin.
Jh
From a book I’m writing and will be out in the Autumn.
Julan62 