I grew up surrounded by women who carried entire worlds in their silence, with their dreams folded into kitchen drawers, their names softened into whispers. I watched each of them holding some quiet grief like an heirloom, passed down and never spoken of. The women in my childhood taught me how to love with a tenderness that trembles. It was from them that I learned early that yearning is not always for people. Sometimes it is for the girl you once were, the one you could not protect, the one you keep calling back from the corners of memory. These poems are attempts at returning. To the rooms that shaped me. To the summers that tasted of sweetness and dust. To the amaltaas trees that broke open just when i needed to believe in softness and light. To every woman I have loved and every version of myself I have tried to gather together again. I write because memory is sometimes the only way we know how to stay alive. I write because some wounds ask to be remembered, not bandaged. If you find pieces of your girlhood here, or the echo of the women who raised you, or the trace of something you thought you had forgotten...then i hope you’ll sit with it a while. We are never alone in our longing. — @aasmanaurayesha
