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Behind me, walking into the sea was my smallest self, a baby girl throwing herself into the waves. Behind her I saw my mother, flying in footsteps to pluck me from the water. My mother's cut foot trailed a red spool of blood in the sand, weaving to the small figure of my mother as a girl, crouched and digging for food, waiting for the sea to offer her something to believe in. Wandering behind my mother I saw her gone mother, watching the sea in a wind-worn dress. Out in the distance was another young woman, and another, each walking beside their own mothers and sisters now, tall women, stern women, a woman whose name I did not know, her upturned face a copper sun, marking me. I bobbed transfixed, neck-deep in waves, watching the women weave and stretch for miles and decades beyond me, beyond and beyond, marking a line that trailed out from our little strip of beach and into the sweltering city, up into the hills and the green backbone of our country. Walking behind her and behind her, I saw them all the women who had put one foot in front of the other and pushed their hands into the dirt. Women who had survived. The women who made me.
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