The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

“Do you think you are the only one who loved him?”

my heart is breaking

He was worth ten of you.

“I hope that Hector kills you.” The breath rasps in his throat. “Do you think I do not hope the same?” he asks.

shattered. my heart is shattered

“It is time to return Hector’s body to his family for burial. You have killed him and taken your vengeance. It is enough.” “It will never be enough,” he says.

omg this is too painful

Servant girls are sent to collect the ashes; they carry them to the golden urn where I rest. Will I feel his ashes as they fall against mine? I think of the snowflakes on Pelion, cold on our red cheeks. The yearning for him is like hunger, hollowing me. Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.

boy stands framed in the tent’s doorway. His hair is bright red, the color of the fire’s crust; he is beautiful, but coldly so, a winter’s morning. Only the dullest would not know which father he means. It is stamped on every line of his face, so close it tears at me.

Do not leave me here without him.

The greater the monument, the greater the man. The stone the Greeks quarry for his grave is huge and white, stretching up to the sky. achilles, it reads. It will stand for him, and speak to all who pass: he lived and died, and lives again in memory.

this hurts me

I would give my life again to make it so.

“I have done my best,” he says. “Let it be remembered I tried.” I remember.

:'((((((((

The Greeks sail, and take my hope with them. I cannot follow. I am tied to this earth where my ashes lie. I curl myself around the stone obelisk of his tomb. Perhaps it is cool to the touch; perhaps warm. I cannot tell. a c h i l l e s, it says, and nothing more. He has gone to the underworld, and I am here.

omfg stop

But the ache for him is stronger than my anger. I want to speak of something not dead or divine. I want him to live. At first it is strange. I am used to keeping him from her, to hoarding him for myself. But the memories well up like springwater, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.

I conjure the boy I knew. Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands. His green eyes laughing into mine. Catch, he says. Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river. The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear. If you have to go, I will go with you. My fears forgotten in the golden harbor of his arms. The memories come, and come. She listens, staring into the grain of the stone. We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.

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

“Go,” she says. “He waits for you.”

oh my god

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.