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She infused the world with her light, before she became a translucent pane of glass through which the light was refracted but never poured forth its precious streams of brightness again … before she paid the price for her husband’s deception.
No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women’s pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats.
The stories of Perseus did not allow for a Medusa with a story of her own.
I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes, and the world would shrink from me instead.
Was this my punishment? To live the reality of my dream and find out that its glittering beauty faded to nothing when I stepped close?
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.”
“But I have told you, Ariadne, that the other gods are not like me. I have walked among mortals for many years and I know the dizzying joys of humanity: the fragile, ferocious power of human love and the savage force of grief. When I share wine with mortals, we celebrate together and I feel the clustered hopes and yearnings, the pain and fears that you all share. In those sacred rites, as simple and ancient as the world itself, we raise a cup and we drink together, and our souls are freed from the constraints of the everyday. We find what unites us, what we have in common with one another. I
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They seemed to be animated by a simple joy of living; the glimmer of moonlight across the waves or the scent of the flowers that clustered everywhere gave rise to yet more song and yet more laughter.
I would never let anyone else know the loneliness I felt watching my husband hold my son.
My world, which had seemed so rich and full as I stood on the beach that morning, watching the glittering surf and marveling at my own good fortune, now suddenly struck me as so very small when looked at from the outside.
And the gods feasted on and on, savoring every last wisp of smoke that rose from the altars that were fueled by despair like hers, so many agonized entreaties to the heavens for the suffering to stop.
“Of all the gods, with all their tricks—thunder, flying sandals, silver bows, and the rest of it—which of them can hold death in their hands and restore it to life? Which of them can renew that which is dissolving to cold smoke before their eyes and make it breathe, warm and vigorous once more? Only I, Ariadne, only I am poised on that delicate line balancing between death and life.
He could measure his glory in female torment and blaze his legend across the heavens as the conqueror of infants, destroyer of the innocent.
