Circe

by Madeline Miller

I had no right to claim him, I knew it. 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.

I would look at him and feel a love so sharp it seemed my flesh lay open.

For sixteen years, I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed.

It is youth’s gift not to feel its debts.

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

There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line.