The Room of Their Own: Prologue
Myth made them symbols. This room makes them whole.
They call it a waiting room, but no one arrives here by choice.
There are no walls, but there is containment. No clocks, yet everyone knows how long they’ve been held. Time here doesn’t move in a straight line—it folds, fractures, loops like a broken anklet. Sometimes you feel it pass like water. Other times, it sits in your chest like smoke.
The air is thick with the scent of camphor and blood memory. You inhale and taste things you haven’t dared to name—shame, longing, the sharpness of rage dressed in silence. It clings to your skin like the first lie someone told about you.
Each woman sees a different version of the place.
For one, it’s a cracked mirror she can’t look away from. For another, a palace reduced to ash. Some see forests with no exits. Others, a quiet riverbank where no one comes looking.
But beneath it all, it is the same room.
A place where women wait.
Not for salvation. Not even for justice.
But for the sound of their own voice, unmuted.
They were pulled from history with surgical precision—cut out, cropped, reworded to fit the margins of a man’s journey. Framed as loyal or lustful, deviant or divine. Their names survived, but their truths were scrubbed clean. Made palatable.
They were wives, muses, and warnings. Symbols.
Essential, but only in service to someone else’s legend.
And yet—here they are.
Breathing in the quiet. Listening. Watching. Learning the shape of themselves without annotation.
Sometimes, one speaks. Not loud, but enough to break the stillness. A low hum. A question left unanswered for centuries. A confession no scripture could hold.
Sometimes, they talk to each other. Sometimes, they don’t need to.
They are not friends. They are not enemies.
They are witnesses.
And in the far corner, she sits.
The youngest. The only one who never walked the earth with a bow on her back or a crown in her hair. No one carved her story into temple stone. No sages debate her purity. No devotees chant her name.
Because she has none.
She was not a myth. She was a girl.
Unseen in life. Unnamed in death. One headline among many. A girl whose body became a protest, whose voice was swallowed by the roar of systems too proud to break.
And now—she listens.
To them. To all of them. Her gaze steady, not with reverence, but recognition.
She is not waiting like the others.
She is remembering for them.
Because someone must carry the truth forward.
And something in the air has started to shift—like a curtain inching open, like a pulse returning to stone.
One is stirring now.
The first voice is ready.
The silence is about to end.
🌀 The Room of Their Own is a series I’m writing to reimagine the women in myth who were erased, silenced, or reshaped to fit someone else’s story.
In this strange, in-between space I’ve built—a kind of cosmic waiting room—they finally get to speak. On their own terms. In their own voices.
One truth at a time.
New chapters drop each week.
Thank you for reading—and for listening.
Looking forward to reading this series...so much has been erased and/or changed. Recently read the translated "The Liberation of Sita" by Volga, and there's this thirst to know more about the subjugation of women..
Wow love this!