Jessica Woodville | Memoir & Musings

Greece doesn’t whisper.
She sings—
low and ancient—
through olive branches and broken columns,
through the breath between heartbeats,
when you’re too tired to go on—
that’s when she begins.

She first whispered my name
in my father’s stories,
his voice dipped in myth and memory,
each name a psalm on the tongue:
Athena. Aegean. Artemis.

Even then,
she was sowing herself in me.

Years passed.
I forgot how to believe—
in gods,
in girls who glow,
in anything gentler than survival.
But she did not forget.

Now, in the hollow
between illness and ache,
between motherhood and mourning,
she howls my name—
thunder through marble,
insistent as tide.

She does not ask.
She begs.
Rise.
Return.
Remember.

What if healing lives in the ruins?
What if I’m not broken—
only buried,
waiting to be unearthed
stone by sacred stone?

Athens says:
Come.
Bring your grief, your grit, your ghost.
Lay them at my feet.
Let the sun sear away what no longer belongs.
Let the sea teach you how to hold joy again—
without flinching.

Let your feet bleed if they must—
but come.
This is the altar.
This is the reckoning.
This is the resurrection.

Athens is calling.
And I am ready to answer.