They came barefoot through the ash and glass,
dragging the hem of history behind them like it owed them something.
Daughters of memory—etched in the brittle pages of notebooks
that never made it out of the fire.

They did not arrive with lullabies or lanterns,
no soft hands,
no rosaries tucked into coat pockets.

They didn’t knock.
They didn’t ask.

I never expected mercy.
I stopped waiting for it the day I learned
that silence has a mother
and her name is shame.

These women—
they are not sisters.
Not to each other,
not to anyone.

There are no secret meetings in the chapel,
no shared needles threaded with redemption.
Just the echo of heels in an abandoned hallway,
and the way one girl once pressed a Polaroid into my palm
and whispered,
“Don’t forget what they did to us.”

No one writes ballads for girls like us.

We are the footnotes of tragedy,
the slashed-out verses of psalms too raw for Sunday morning.

We don’t wear white.
We wear blood under our fingernails
and laughter like a knife in the ribs.

Not the laughter of joy—God, no.
The laughter of survival.
That cruel, cracked sound that says,
you didn’t get me this time.

We are the bruises no one can photograph.
The bite marks we learned to hide with lipstick.
The backseat confessions that tasted like rust and cigarette ash.

They call us troubled.
They call us broken.
They call us every fucking thing
except truth.

And maybe we are.

Maybe we are just ghosts with bones,
daughters born from memory alone.
No sisters of mercy.

Only women who carry their own names like gravestones,
their own hearts like contraband.

We write in the margins
because the center is a lie.
We remember what they want us to forget—
that pain doesn’t sanctify,
that faith doesn’t feed,
that sometimes the most merciful thing you can do for yourself
is burn the whole fucking thing down.

I never asked for salvation.
I only wanted the kind of peace
that doesn’t come with conditions.

So here we are—
Rising like smoke.
Bleeding like saints.
And screaming
like the last goddamn hymn
in a church set ablaze.

Not to be saved—
but to be seen.