Circe

by Madeline Miller

When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

I was like any dull ass who has ever loved someone who loved another. I thought: if only she were gone, it would change everything.

Until that moment I had not known how many things I feared.

The fear sloshed over me, each wave colder than the last. The still air crawled across my skin and shadows reached out their hands. I stared into the darkness, straining to hear past the beat of my own blood. Each moment felt the length of a night, but at last the sky took on a deepening texture and began to pale at its edge. The shadows ebbed away and it was morning. I stood up, whole and untouched. When I went outside, there were no prowling footprints, no slithering tail-marks, no gouges clawed in the door. Yet I did not feel foolish. I felt as if I had passed a great ordeal.

There was fear in that knowledge, but after my long night of terrors it felt small and inconsequential. The worst of my cowardice had been sweated out. In its place was a giddy spark. I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.

All this while, I have been a weaver without wool, a ship without the sea. Yet now look where I sail.

a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands.

That was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and

tricks. Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

“A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.”

But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

The winter rains began, and the whole island smelled of earth. I loved the season, the cold sands, the white hellebore blooming.

The air that drifted in felt washed and very clear. Each sound—bird trills, fluttering leaves, the hush of waves—hung in the air like a chime.

reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.

I had told myself that when he was away I would do all the things I had set aside for sixteen years. I would work at my spells from dawn until dusk, dig up roots and forget to eat, harvest the withy stems and weave baskets till they piled to the ceiling. It would be peaceful, the days drifting by. A time of rest.

My old mistake, running so quickly to help him that I did not stop to think.

perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

Every step would be a memory I wished I did not have.”

Why must I be happy? Is it not enough that I let you go?

he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

I felt reckless suddenly. Sick of all my fretting and convincing, my careful plotting. It came to some by nature, but not to me.

I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.