It has been almost twenty years since I last saw your ship on the shore. Almost two decades since I last heard the tumbling melody of your voice reverberating among these halls, since your arms encircled my waist and your kiss blessed my lips. I have slept alone in the bed you built for us, raised our child without his father, and fended off the exploitation of your neighbors. I am so tired. My eyes and heart hurt from watching the waters for you.
Those first weeks after the men began coming home from the war were wrenching. It was horrendous to watch men who had been gone for so long return to the arms of wives and children while my son and I remained alien, as did all the wives on your ship. People talked. Whispers floated on smoky vapors at parties, plays, and other social functions about your fate. Everyone was, and is, convinced that you have met your mortal end.
But I refuse to accept their belief. Your soul is mine, my Love, and I would know if that part of me were lost to Hades. I know I would feel the loss, just as I felt the loss when our first daughter, our only other child, died as a baby in the middle of the night. I will never forget the chasm that her death left in me when I awoke from my dreams in the darkness, knowing she was gone before I ever held her lifeless infant form in my arms.
So I can at least hold to that. I have a clue, an inkling deep within me, that you are not irretrievable… that your soul still dwells somewhere across the waters.
But, my Love, the days without you here are arduous.
I spend them now, not watching for you to come over the hill to meet me for our evening meal, but concentrating on the waves beyond the walls, hoping to find the dark speck of your ship on the blue plane, heading back to the port in which it belongs. Men carouse in our home, day and night, eating away my son’s inheritance; uninvited interlopers trying to convince me that you are gone and they should be the next wife of Penelope and king of this land. I refuse to entertain such asinine rudeness… men who have not even offered to court me, but instead drain the resources of my home and try to corrupt the blood of my womb. I know that you made me promise to remarry if you did not return, but even if I had confirmation that you were gone, I would never dishonor your memory as a ruler and a husband or debase myself to the point that I would offer my hand to any member of this squalor. But nor can I leverage any authority in this city to keep their corrupt presence from our walls, so I am left only with the option of refusing their advances and refusing to honor their deplorable show at courtship.
I look for you, as twilight falls, in the stars, knowing that your deeds would have earned a place among Orion and Ursa if your end had come. Though I have my instinct, I cannot accept only the warmth in my chest as confirmation that you yet live, and I search for the evidence, anywhere I can find it, to confirm that you still breathe the air of this land, even if you are far from your home.
Each night, I shed my skin in sleep and wander the earth, like the Egyptian Isis, looking for pieces of you… a hint of your presence on this globe. I journey to Styx, to Acheron, and cross what few souls see until they have left their flesh for the final time. The Ferryman watches from his bark as my feet glide over the eddies, leaving concentric rings of black water in my wake. No authority constrains my path, for I share the darkness of the Underworld with the ghosts of its shadows… I live in its gloom every waking hour my husband’s ship fails to break the horizon, and I therefore belong to its obscurity as truly as every spirit living in misery there.
I search for my Love each night in this darkness of death, sifting through souls consigned to eternal rest or anguish, pleading to Persephone to point out my husband’s shade if he has come to dwell in this dank crevice. But every night, my wanderings are in vain. The Immortal Gods keep my eyes from laying upon the one visage I ache most to see. Their wrath for him, for he must have done something to incite such a long separation from his home, becomes my anguish as well.
I have heard legends, murmured in awe, of your exploits in the war on the lips of those who have returned. They say you fought valiantly in the war. They say that your ingenuity ended the conflict decisively, with a simple, deceptive gift to the Trojans. The warriors that return say that you would speak of nothing else on that day but your breathtaking wife and precious son, and how anxious you were to finish things on that distant shore so you could return to her adoring embrace and experience for the first time the shining eyes and musical laughter of your little boy, at that time almost a decade older than when you’d left him, cradled as an infant in his mother’s arms.
Another decade has passed since that day, and that boy is now a man. I have tried to keep you alive for him; I have told him daily of his father and how he had gone to a great war to honor his vow. When he was very young, I made up stories of your exploits and told them to our little boy as he drifted to sleep each night. I have tried to raise him as we would have together, encouraging him to be both strong and wise, urging him to foster the quick wit and cleverness which lives so vibrantly in you. There is so much of you in him… I hear you in the melody of his laugh, see your intensity in his eyes… the citizens and servants commonly proclaim how easy it is to divine the identity of his father from just a simple glance.
My body and soul burn with the vendetta owed my dishonored being as I watch the vipers feed viciously upon my husband’s livelihood and hear their whispered plots to take his image from me as well in his progeny’s form, to remove from me the last vestiges of my Beloved’s presence by slaying our only son and removing the competition to the throne. How my flesh aches to feel the satisfying slick of their blood between my fingers as my blade slices through the flesh of each one, to the last man… to rip the perfect ebony locks from the scalps of these sniveling snakes and cut the pretentious smiles from their lips. How I yearn to have the invincibility of the Goddess, that I could take my vengeance at the tip of a sword on each villain vying for a chance to violate my being.
I have spent the past two decades dying by inches. By seconds, clicking by in depraved regularity as the heart beats in my chest. My body betrays me, marking the passing days as it hungers and thirsts, the months in red lines as the moon cycles through the sky.
I embrace our bedpost, my Love, in the darkness where I used to rest in the sturdy timber of your arms, the living tree betraying the passage of years as it grows wider and I grow more gaunt. If only I could feel the love from the branches and leaves that you fashioned into our marriage bed which I once felt from the solace of your embrace. If only, in fashioning the bed in which we slept for a decade before your fateful trip across the waters, you had left a piece of your soul in the living wood, to offer me comfort and solace in these hours of abandonment.
I hold the little golden effigy of Athena you gave me for the harvest festival the year before your ship left port and gaze into the flames as my fingers trail along the folds in her little robe, the curls falling in glittering waves across her shoulders. I stare into the eyes of the tiny statue and beg her to intervene. I leverage the only power I have left, the power of a faithful supplicant to kneel before her Goddess, and implore her intervention. I remind her, in whispered reverence, of our faithfulness, how we have spent our lives as her servants, following her every direction with faith, giving gratefully and generously to her honor. I beg her to remember her servant, Odysseus, even if our ability to give to her has waned. I plead with her to hold me close, to offer me her guidance, until you can be at my side again to share in the decisions for our lives, our son, our home, and our community. I ask Athena for wisdom, hope and patience.
I pray to you as well… as my Husband, my Guardian, and my Love, straining for the only communication left to me; the communication of one soul directly to another. I pray that you keep yourself safe, that you will heed the counsel of the Gods, and that you will follow the voice of your wife to your home. I am sure that the Gods forgive this small heresy, for I know their eyes cannot have been averted from my plight.
All feels lost, my darling. As I watch your house fall to ruin, your son grow up without you, my body slowly, certainly, losing the luster of youth, I wonder how much longer the Gods will see fit to rend my soul like this.
I can’t lose hope. Hope is all I have left. I can’t lose hope.
Copyright 2007 S.L. Olson
18 September 2007
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