Ariadne

by Jennifer Saint

I saw her weighed down in the tumultuous water not just by the iron chains in which my father had bound her but also by the terrible truth that she had sacrificed everything she knew for a love as ephemeral and transient as the rainbows that glimmered through the sea spray.

Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing. Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled. And how everything they once were, that spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief.”

Theseus had not left me because I was at fault or because I did not matter. He had left because, to him, nothing mattered at all beyond the cold pursuit of his own fame. I would not let a man who knew the value of nothing make me doubt the value of myself.