Clytemnestra

by Costanza Casati

Human lives are based on pain. But to have a few moments of happiness, lightning tearing the darkness of the sky, that is worth it.

‘I learned to overcome those fears. I had to, or I would have died. But something stayed inside me, a feeling of rootlessness, of floating through life trying not to drown.’ She listens, though she doesn’t know that sensation. Every step she has taken since she was a child had a direction. And it brought her here.

He doesn’t know this, but he gave her a chance too, which no one else did. He told her: Look, I am as damaged as you, but here I am.

There will come a time when songs are sung about her, about the people she loved and the ones she hated. They will sing of her mother, the queen seduced by a god, of her brothers, boxers and horse-breakers, of her sister, a woman so vain who couldn’t stay in her husband’s bed, of Agamemnon, the proud lion of Mycenae, of the wise, many-minded Odysseus, of the treacherous, cursed Aegisthus, of Clytemnestra, cruel queen and unfaithful wife. But it doesn’t matter. She was there. She knows songs never tell the truth.