For twenty-two years, I moved through steam and silence,
not because I loved the dark,
but because the work demanded it.
I knew the pulse of boiler lines,
the hum of pressure vessels whispering truth through their seams.
My hands, steady and calloused,
traced blueprints like braille—
translating risk into readiness,
chaos into code.
There were no parades.
No ribbons pinned when I kept the system breathing,
when I walked the line between shutdown and disaster,
between regulation and reality.
I earned trust in measured doses—
not by name, not by title—
but by showing up when the others flinched.
I mentored quietly,
solved loudly,
stood shoulder to shoulder with men
who didn’t always expect me to last.
But I did.
And I delivered.
Now the site is nearly quiet.
My badge, still warm from long days,
Will soon rests in a drawer beside a folded vest
and the list of systems I walked from birth to burial.
They say the mission is all but over.
That the work is finally done.
But no one tells you
what to do with a lifetime of vigilance.
I scroll job boards instead of piping schematics,
wondering how to reduce
decades of fire-tested precision
into two pages of bullet points.
Wondering if they’ll see
the woman who stayed late,
who rewrote procedures until they could be lived,
who spoke with data and never backed down from pressure—
literal or otherwise.
What does a mission woman do
when the mission ends?
She sharpens her tools.
She rewrites the ending.
She waits—
not for permission—
but for the next place that needs
her spine of steel
and her gift for seeing the invisible fault
just before it breaks.
