Together we built a bridge

                    ‘You think you know things when you are sixteen’

The words from that one conversation

which stuck to me. 

You are my mirror it seems.

I am every girl you have already been.

In the reflection of such similarity, 

my own girlhood grins back at me.

We spend hours 

top and tail 

tracing through our history. 

Picking over every brick we used 

to build a bridge into womanhood.

The scuffs they left on your palms 

bare a startling symmetry 

to the scars etched on mine,

Each bruise is unity 

forged the day they crowned us as ‘woman’.

You have wept every single tear I have cried.

Just girls

dragged up the same

under the shadow of crumbling mills,

lager tops 

 and boys in bands. 

-

See,

I never thought I could be more than a slave to my history,

but then I read the story you write for me, 

our half-cracked litany of femininity.

We cross the rivers together 

on new built paths. 

We link arms.

We hold tight.

We step away from the past.