The Watchwoman’s Inheritance
(or, What It Costs to Be the Nervous System of a Sleeping World)
I walk the seam. That fraying place where breath starts forgetting its own rhythm, where the air pinches just a little, as though God tucked regret into the oxygen for flavor. The tree line doesn’t separate forest from field so much as whisper between dimensions. And I always, always seem to land where dusk forgets how to hold its shape. Light not fading exactly but falling out of context. Unpinned. Filament undone. I inhale resin and some older, saltless grief. Maybe bark remembers what the body tries to forget.
The trees lie. That’s the first truth. They creak like tired joints, try on the voice of wind and fail. I translate anyway. I always do. Even half-truths deserve a listener.
Heartbeat becomes a slow-measured tape, the kind surveyors once used to decide what mattered. This pine tree, that ridge. This fear, that bone. Every pulse a boundary line that nobody else seems to know is there. Owl syllables swing overhead. Not hoots. Not calls. More like umlauts falling from invisible grammar. I count them out. I file them under Possible Warnings or Possible Jokes the Universe Keeps Telling Itself When It Can’t Sleep.
Behind me, fire drinks oxygen through toddler lungs. Loud, messy gulps. Its red mouth slurs lullabies into the hairlines of the sleeping. They lie scattered in the glow, dreaming suburban dreams. Fresh laundry. Coupon codes. A good chair. I envy them with a kind of aching that fold’s inward like paper under flame. They sleep, and I dream for them. Though dreaming, here, doesn’t feel like dreaming at all. It feels like teeth grinding through silence.
Every snapped twig reads like bone. Every wind shift wears the scent of prowler. My fascia thrums with epigenetic semaphore. It is not me who trembles, exactly. It’s the archive lodged in ligament. It’s every woman who outlived ambush. Every cousin who didn’t. Evolution tugs at my spine and reminds me how the inattentive become artifacts. My marrow knows the tax code. I pay in cortisol and breath held too long.
Then the metallic tang. Not blood. Not rust. Something more specific. Like a weapon remembering what it once loved. Time curdles. The forest dilates. And my body does what it was engineered to do before engineering had language for it. I cry out, not elegantly. Not even articulately. More like a fire alarm strapped to a throat.
The flames leap. The sleeper’s jolt. Their eyes turn toward me, not toward the sound. Me. As though I asked for this. As though I volunteered to be the trembling perimeter. I did not. I do not. And yet, I pace the edge as though I belong there.
The danger recedes. Not defeated. Just inconvenienced. It sulks somewhere in the brush, nursing its grievance like a scorned god. And still, they settle. Back into slack-jawed peace. I envy and resent them simultaneously. They trust the night again. They trust me. That trust burns hotter than the fire.
I pace until the sky goes slack and rinses itself into morning. They stretch. Yawn. Return to their lives with breath untroubled by memory. I carry their peace like coins I didn’t earn. The weight of borrowed safety. It clinks in my chest when I sit too still.
This loop, this ceaseless seam-walk, it doesn’t end. It only folds. I return to the tree line each night, not because I want to, but because I still remember what awe feels like before it curdles into dread. And because I suspect the woods are not angry, exactly. Just bored of being misunderstood.
I carry the ache in the crooks of joints no one sees. Not martyrdom. Not even strength. Just a woman who knows too well what it means to be the nervous system of a people too soothed to notice what keeps them breathing.
And still I return. Because the ache is the last honest thing I know. Because awe, even jagged, even bleeding, still matters more than sleep. Because someone must remember how to listen when every room forgets how to fear.