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He clears his throat and continues, “Perhaps my great-grandfather would’ve invited you up to see his estampes japonaises. But I assure you my intentions are far more honorable.” Now I’m the one who’s confused. What would Dumas owning Japanese prints have to do with any—“Wait, wait, is that like the ancient French version of ‘Netflix and chill’?”
I think of this raven-haired woman who inspired Dumas’s passion. A woman who doesn’t even get a name of her own. There are literally centuries of women who never got to tell their stories.
Is there a way for the world to end right now, in this moment of life’s perfection? Can the heavens fall, crushing us in this knotted embrace forever, until we are stardust? So that the light of our love spreads across the darkness, perfuming the firmament with sandalwood and rose petals?
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astounding light of your own being. A quote from Hafiz,
“Though your heart may be broken, yet brokenly can you live on. And the privilege of being a poet is the ability to make beautiful that which the world has distorted.”
“There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure with them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”
Maybe what saves them is us—the people who are alive to hear the stories and pass them on. To give them weight and power in the retelling. In the not forgetting.
When we say history is written by the victors, we mean history is written by the patriarchy.
Women have always played a central role in building society, yet here we are, even today, our word and our testimony deemed unbelievable, our work undervalued. Even more so if you are an individual of color, nonbinary, queer, trans, an immigrant, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, et al intersections of identity.
