A wise and supportive friend mailed me a “mixed tape” featuring this song a few months ago — he thought it captured the essence of The Salt God’s Daughter. I have to agree. Literature and music go together.
Source: youtube.com via Anwar & Rawan on Pinterest
Some stories never leave you, no matter how hard you try to ignore them or how many years go by. They have a voice that is already perceptible. Their cadence and shape are like footprints in the snow on a path you have not yet traveled. From the start, you can see these footprints, but not where they will lead you. You might not even know you have begun to follow them until you stop and look back.
Women. Love. Virginity. The 70s. The things they told girls and all they didn’t say. The moments that made some hide under blankets with their noses buried in books, who later ran wild at night. The reasons that some girls grew up to find themselves having no place and how they found “a someplace.” The innate divinity that gave them the will to continue to fight and carve new paths that were not easy but were their own. The Salt God’s Daughter is a story about the ties between mothers and daughters. It’s a story about those who have passed on, and those who have not yet been born, grandmothers and daughters, sisters and aunts, as indelible as shadows, as invisible ink written on your skin, always with you, each one, waiting for the right light and the right time to be seen. Each one, appearing at times as if a tissue thin flower petal, delicate and tremulous, and then suddenly stunning you with the knowledge that within each flower petal lies a strong drumming beat of a pulse.
Why We Write…for all the girls that grew up to become great women. This one is for you.
To all the girls who ran wild at 17,
Who let their hair grow long and flung it boldly in the rain, who dyed their hair, who snuck out of windows and stayed out too late, who drank and smoked and danced too much, to those who may have hurt themselves, who may have sat in cars with boys they didn’t love, who suffered under judgmental glares praying for invisibility. To those girls who jumped off bridges into cold rivers and swam, who wore too much eye-liner, who fought, who loved, who fell, who made mistakes, and got up again, and ran, untethered, to where and to what they couldn’t have known. To all of you I implore you: Take heart, you who have passion, who will ultimately prove your place in things; you, who will ultimately bring magic and change to the world.
