5 posts tagged “persephone”

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.   

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