The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

As I sat, I met his eyes, quickly, almost guiltily, then looked away. My face was flushing, I was sure.

For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? It was enough to watch him win,

I know those hands. But even here, behind the darkness of my eyelids, I cannot name the thing I hope for.

“Do not let what you gained this day be so easily lost.”

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

When he died, all things swift and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.”

If you have to go, I will go with you.

“I could not make him a god,” she says. Her jagged voice, rich with grief. But you made him.