Halcyon

inheritence

We never meant to become our mothers
yet here we are,
standing in the same kitchens,
hands wet with the same dishwater,
hearts heavy with the same silence.

Every broken woman was once a little girl,
staring from the door ajar,
promising, vowing, swearing
that we'd never be her.

But circles,
they have a way of finding us.
Quietly. Gently. Brutally.
We wear their gestures
without knowing when they slipped onto our skin.
The same tired smiles,
the same trembling forgiveness,
the same way we say I'm fine
when what we mean is I'm drowning.

Perhaps the cycle always wins
because it's older, and crueler
and heavier
than both of us combined.
Maybe it eats daughters
the same way it ate mothers
quietly, politely,
in kitchens and bedrooms
and conversations where
we swallow ourselves whole.

Maybe the circle won't rest.
Maybe it never does.
Because it never did.
We were supposed to be different.
We were supposed to escape.
But life has a strange way
of blurring rebellion into resemblance.

And one morning, we wake up
the mirror holds their faces inside ours.
We rewrite the same story with different ink.
And oh, look—how we have turned
into their silhouettes.

We swore we'd never become them,
but the blood remembers, and
Never effin' forgets.
The revolution we promised
died in the same bed
we once pitied them for.

We became them in self-defence.
We thought we were breaking chains,
but we were just polishing them.
We named freedom after the same men
who taught us endurance.

The same silence,
just in a newer voice.
We are our mothers' daughters,
fighting the same wars
with prettier words.

Maybe this is how inheritance works,
not in money, or property,
but in the quiet ache
of women who loved too much
and forgot themselves in the process,
passed down for centuries
like heirloom jewels.

And maybe,
if we choose softness without surrender,
if we bleed and still build,
if we love and still leave when we must,
then our daughters
will inherit something lighter.

Maybe they'll grow up watching
not our breaking,
but our becoming.
And maybe then
after a thousand years
of mothers and daughters
trying to unlearn pain
the circle will finally rest.

But who'll break the cycle first?
She or I?
Maybe both.
Or maybe neither.

Maybe it cracks in the space between us
when we stop whispering
and start naming the hurt aloud.
Maybe it ends
in the small rebellions
of resting, laughing, choosing.

Maybe it ends tonight,
in this poem
where she and I
finally meet as equals.

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