Persephone
Stories always start with men in my world. The creation of the earth, of the planet, is through men; though the women are truly the birthers, the creators, the fierce and ferocious ones, the men are the holy ones, the worshipped ones. It is a nonsensical tradition, the way my family believes in men like they are responsible for peppering the world with blooming life. We women are the brutal ones; the ones who feel everything but are restrained from feeling enough; the unlucky ones under the laws and orders of men who attempt to suppress our thoughts and our voices. We are taught how to speak but we are told to be quiet when we do, that anger is a male quality, that our bodies do not wholly belong to us, even as goddesses, even as powerful beings creating and destroying life.
This is not how this story starts.
This story starts with a girl. This story starts with me; with my uncaged heart, the softness that aches underneath my frail skin of forced resilience. Me, young, with every piece of me scattered and uncertain, things lost and diminished. I was cracked apart at a young age, by men, by a man, but I am determined to say that my story nevertheless starts with me, not the men who tried to shell me into a carcass of a person. I am more than the wounds or the duct-tape pressed around my intellect and independent ferocity. I love too fiercely, too uninhibitedly, to really begin my story with a man. It begins with the unraveling, with the way my mind hurt and twisted, until I allowed myself to fall into something I would gladly never untangle from. I let myself be loved and love someone more than the universe could bear.
This story starts with a woman. With Persephone. And it ends with an us.
No- it doesn't end at all.
YOU ARE READING
pomegranates: hades and persephone
RomanceAn unnervingly intelligent, unusual, soft-hearted goddess of springtime. A moody, hardened ruler of hell. a crossing of paths. feelings emerge and both of their worlds are turned utterly upside down.
