6 posts tagged “archetypes”

Perhaps the reason I feel at home here, Persephone mused, is not that he has created a space for the Light, but that I belong to the Dark, and this is my home more than the flowers could ever be.

I could have chosen differently, you know.

I might have insisted.  I could have refused.  It's what she would have wanted me to do, my mother.  My loving, warm, overprotective, sheltering mother.  My mother, who is a child in some ways that I have never been.

She would have wanted me to refuse.  I knew that.  In every sense of the word - evade, reject, demur.  How could this man, so cold, so austere, so foreign to everything she wanted for me, be what I want?  Her light-kissed, flower-spreading daughter of summer, embodiment of spring.  Eyes the colour of spring grass, hair the colour of the sun. 

Of course Hell Itself would want such a thing, but Hell's intentions could never be pure.

Except that it wasn't really a choice.  Not that my hand was forced, either - the way the story is told nowadays, it makes it seem that I was coerced, that I was tricked and bullied.  The man must either be a devil, or the girl a fool - is that it?  Of course it is.  Mama would rather see me a fool, an easily-manipulated, blindly trusting innocent, corrupted and coerced by Someone Who Should Know Better.  Someone who would see that heart on my sleeve and take advantage. 

Mama would rather me a fool than face the fact that this is what I wanted, and I had, for once, not chosen to her liking.

Mama would rather me a fool than a woman.

Six seeds.  Inconsequential, fiddling little things - red and shining like gemstones in the palm of his hand, the red of the fruit staining his white palm like the marks I had left on his back with my fingernails.  Staining his palm like the blood my mother would certainly see on his hands, regardless of whether it was there or not.  Like a wound, like what my heart would be if forced to leave. 

And so, I took the seeds, even though I knew they would make me ill.  I took the seeds from his hands, hands that, when they touched me, burned on my skin, surprisingly warm for the Lord of the Underworld.  Those ice-blue eyes, beautiful and pleading in his sombre face with this last-ditch effort.  I took each seed from him and ate them slowly, deliberately, and tried not to cry as I felt my skin grow cooler, whiter, and saw my hair go darker.  He knew, he saw the shadows winding around me, and he held me close, my head on his chest and his hand in my darkening hair.  "I'm sorry," he said, in that lugubrious, dark voice, and he was.  "If it could have been any other way..."

I shook my head, tears standing in my eyes.  We both knew it couldn't. 

Had I refused (evaded, rejected, demured), I would have remained her child of spring, but I would never have warmed the frost from my heart.  What my mother, immortal as she is, failed to realise is that I was always his, and this is the way it was always meant to be, and that this was no more a choice to me than breathing.  Than choosing to let my heart beat on its own.   

It 'reminds' me of rainy mornings yet to come, when I wake up entangled in the white sheets of his bed, the minimal furnishing of his apartment bedecked with sheet music and half-filled blank staff paper and all the bits and pieces he jots words and remembrances of melodies on - napkins, hotel paper, notepaper, post-its, bank statements, once even on a paper flower he'd bought me. Words and music surround us. He has a cup of hot tea ready for me, even as he is scribbling on the backs of envelopes, words that he can't contain any longer.

He's a poet and he paints pictures with his words. the tea mug is white like the sheets, the tea is dark brown like the rumpled mess of his hair. He lives in black turtlenecks and he tells me my hair smells of "holy and roses."

The words inevitably go to songs and melodies, he's a poet of music the way he calls me his poet of life. There is always black ink on the pads of his left-hand fingers, darkest on the point of his middle finger where it rests against his pen. Sometimes the ink migrates to his mouth, and it looks like he's been chewing on his pen.

Those stained hands are large and long-fingered, not quite rough but not smooth either. He chews on his fingernails and I playfully smack his hands when I see them wander thoughtfully to his mouth. He says he'll only stop if he can bite my fingernails instead, and I grudgingly let him have his silly vices.

Vices. He smokes and he drinks too much expensive red wine and he curses like a sailor.  He spends too much on music that he ends up not liking. He has a long-burning fuse but a vile temper. There are scars on his hands from the things he's broken in fits of rage.

He always needs music. When there isn't any playing in the overly-expensive music-playing apparatus he has, or when there isn't any way to have music outside himself, it emits like a fountain from his fingers and his mouth and he taps and hums until it's no longer proper to take him out in polite company. He rarely speaks to people he doesn't know, but he made an exception for me because I was wearing coloured pencils in my hair that day and humming the Claire de lune. He still calls me Claire even though my name is Jamie and before that it was Christine, and he knows both and that it's never been Claire. It's a pet-name, and symbolic.

He wears glasses and his teeth are crooked. he dreams in black and white movies and I am the colourful thing in them. He loves my hair and my feet and he thinks that I have beautiful handwriting. He's taken a series of pictures of me, sleeping, half-curled in shadow and crisp sheets, my hair spread out like a mermaid's. He believes I am every beautiful thing in his life, and part other-worldly. He never calls me 'princess.'

He still plays Debussy for me on the piano and Mozart on the violin. He breathes melody and hears music in everything. He taught me to sing my own song again. he recognises that I am Jamie and I am Christine and I have been many other people and that he has almost always been there, and that we are still all those people and none of those people if you peel back the layers.

He believes that tea can solve anything, too, though he has a plebian love of coffee.  His favourite is chai.

We love and fear each other because we know our propensity for hurt and betrayal, but neither of us has run away yet.

I remember all of this even though it hasn't happened yet, I remember it in the warmth of my teacup in my hand and the sound of rain on the pavement. I remember it in the depths of my heart where that last little bit of me waits for him.

- 06.09.06

The fear of inadequacy.  What a sad, hollow word that is.

(the hollow silence that follows)

The fear that your suspicions will be proven right.  The little self-deprecating jabs that, when they go undeflected, wound more deeply than anything a naysayer might murmur.

(after the offhand comments)

Her throat closes, and he doesn't notice.  Her mood darkens, and he wonders why.  In saying nothing, he admits she's right, and he knows that - but it's true, and he's promised to be truthful.  It's a sepulchral, black sort of honesty.  Fitting, for him, that. 

(with my childish, wavering voice)

She doesn't remember how to handle this sort of simple, bruising truth.  It's what she had come to expect from him in ages long past, but in this life where the most difficult masks are emotional, her preparation was inadequate.

(that's forgotten all you taught me)

In the autumn, there is the inevitable Darkening of Persephone.