There are stories we are told to share—and stories we are told to bury. Soraya lived in the silence between the two.
She wasn’t loud. She wasn’t visible. But Soraya was everything.
A scribe. A keeper. A lover. A witness. A flame.
She lived in a time when truth was punished, when love had to hide, and when writing the wrong name could cost a life. So she wrote in symbols. In margins. On skin, clay, cloth—anything that could carry the forbidden when the paper ran out.
Soraya was born with a veil over her face—a sign in her time that she had crossed from another world. She remembered things she had never been taught. She carried the ache of lost loves and silenced names in her left shoulder. And when she fell in love with another woman—a healer named Samara—she buried the story behind walls, behind chants, behind sighs that never made it to dawn.
But she never forgot. And she never truly left.
Today, her story is rising again through my pen. Through yours. Through every woman who was told she was too much, too soft, too loud, too queer, too broken, too wild to be holy.
Soraya was not a secret. She was a sentinel.
When I write late at night by candlelight, I feel her. When my shoulder aches before a truth comes through, I know it’s her. When I hesitate to share the stories that might make others uncomfortable—she is the one who places her hand on me and whispers:
“Now. Tell it all.”
Soraya is the watcher of the unwritten, the keeper of the ink that never dried. She is not here to make anyone comfortable. She is here to make sure truth never dies quietly again.
To the women who carry stories in their marrow:
You are her continuation.
To the ones who write and erase and write again:
She is with you.
To the girl who hides her poems:
She has already read them. And wept. And loved them.
To the survivor who was told not to speak:
Your voice is holy. Speak anyway.
And to you, if you are reading this—
She found you on purpose.
Her initials are S.T.W. — Soraya, The Watcher. Write them in the margins. Whisper them when you’re scared. Remember them when your hand starts to shake.
She is real. She is ancient. And she is watching the night until your story is safe.