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Beauty is a whim, it changes as easily as the tide. I was once considered the most beautiful, until familiarity bred tedium.
I was a queen of women once, before my husband bound me with chains and made me a queen of wives.
“This is the world we live in. We are not heroes. We do not choose to be great; we have no power over our destinies. The scraps of freedom that we have are to pick between two poisons, to make the least bad decision we can, knowing that there is no outcome that will not leave us bruised, bloody on the floor.
“The gods are foolish and blind – they think the greatest poems are the ones of death in battle and the ravishing of queens. But the stories that will live for ever are of the lost ones, the fearful ones, who through bitter hardship and despair find hope, find strength – find their way home. Victory should always have a price.
No weakness, I breathe. No tears. Only you can straighten your back. She staggers, hand to her belly, a gasp, a sucking-in of harsh breath. Then she straightens, slow. Breathes away foolishness. Stands as the mountain does.
Only grief sits now where there should have been the memory of the woman he loved, and grief is unacceptable. Sorrow unmans him. He will never look upon it, never wash it away with cool balm, nor name it, nor call it his own, and so instead inwards, inwards, inwards it curls like the weedy root that becomes a tree within the unwatched soil of his heart. So goes the spirit of a sometime-was-good man.
I choose when to straighten my spine, but it grows hard, so, so hard.
“Pick your fights,” he would say. “You only have so many arrows.”
What little power she has, she has taken. It tastes nothing like freedom.
This is not Penelope’s heart breaking. She has woven so much rope around her heart, tied it and tied it and tied it shut, that though it shatters, yet it cannot fall apart. Not yet. This is not the sound of her world falling apart, for every morning she stands upon Ithaca’s soil and says to herself, I am here, and I will do what is done. The world does not tumble away from you when you have spent so much time learning to walk upon it.
