Part 1: The Women Before Us

The fire in the Fire place crackles softly — the sound of old thoughts burning down to something useful. I sit close, wrapped in a blanket that smells faintly of cedar and time, and I ask myself again: Why am I like this? Why can’t I just let things go like everyone else?

“Because you were never built for small truths,”
the answer comes back, dry and sharp — like a friend who knows you too well.

I’ve always been a rebel in others’ eyes — the one who questions, who asks why, who sees the things people politely ignore and speaks about them as they are. No diplomacy. No sugar. Just truth. Maybe that’s why people found me uncomfortable — righteousness rarely makes friends. But silence, to me, has always felt like betrayal.

Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror — the white hair showing more boldly now — and I don’t flinch. I let it be. Let it define me. Let it say, Yes, she has lived. Yes, she still burns.

The firelight dances on the walls, and I realize that the women before us didn’t hide from aging; they were too busy surviving it. So when someone asks me why I don’t color my hair, I laugh.

“Because I earned it. Because I’m done pretending youth is the only kind of beauty worth keeping.”

And in that laugh, I feel them — all those women who kept their mouths shut so I could open mine.