On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

All the roads here are not graveled in rock, girls, but with the woman’s scars, because only a woman’s scars are strong enough to bear something driving over them, again and again.”

They tried to burn away her power because a woman who says more than she’s supposed to say, and does more than she’s supposed to do, is a woman they’ll try to silence and destroy.

“Power is not only physical. It’s not some muscleman lifting all the weights. It’s much more than that. It’s being smart. It means you endure.”

“Thing about time is, you never feel like you have enough of it.”

We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.

Destruction is just a phase. Sometimes we have to break like an artifact in order to be discovered whole.