It was Helen’s face that
launched a thousand ships,
but you unleashed Achilles.
How were you to know that
poets would sing of his rage?
– that innumerable men would
meet their deaths at the end of
his grief-stricken spear?
How were you to know when you
went to battle in his armor that
you would never return to him?
– that you had brought about his
death as surely as your own?
He wept –
and his mother in the depths
of the sea heard his cries.
He wept –
and he dirtied his face,
and tore at his hair, and wished for death.
Eternal glory was not worth the price he paid.
It was not worth the loss of you,
Patroclus, whom he loved as his own life.
What was Achilles to do when his heart
burned with you on the pyre?
What was he to do when his home became
nothing but ashes in a golden urn?
He was nearly a god –
son of a goddess, best of the Greeks.
He fell to an arrow, the poets say,
guided by Apollo himself.
The poets are wrong.
He was nearly a god –
but he was mortal, and he fell to that
great mortal weakness: love.
You would have followed him anywhere, even into death.
You must have known that he would do the same.
Guys, please don’t ask me stuff like this. I get a fair number of messages each week asking me that the Ronan books be smutty. I get it, y’all are excited, you come to the books for various reasons, and that’s fine, but please note:
1. I have not, to this point, written explicit books.
2. As a woman, I am not about to suddenly break that trend with a smutty m/m sex scene, particularly featuring young men half my age. I am not a gay or bi man. I don’t want to be anywhere close to exploitative.
3. I hope y’all can respect my boundaries on this.
Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck.
Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.
Always wondered why we trivialize childhood fears. Those potent, loaded and entirely understandable products of raw vigilant minds taking in the inexplicable randomness of the universe. For there might as well be monsters under our beds and creatures of the night wanting who’s to say what from us. The threat of harm to self and loved ones, the fear of potential violence lurking around corners, the dreaded possibility of familiarity being taken away, of losing toys and friends and favorite teachers deciding to switch schools, all legit in their own right. The fears of an adult on the other hand, are the stuff of laughable conundrums. We are petrified of the possibility of missing somebody, so much so that we’d rather not have them around in the first place. We break out in hives at the thought of a wrong decision, the consequences of which are just as unremarkable as most of of our lives. What should have been wonderful memories start lacing night terrors and early morning sweats. To be an adult is to secretly, fervently pray for the things we love to not turn on us - the people, the jobs, the food, the technology, our own bodies. And when they do, like they always do, we somehow feel equal parts guilty and equal parts wiser. As if we didn’t actively fear enough and here was a healthy reminder, a skipped dose to be be reincorporated with double potency. If ageing is being vehemently afraid of how shit makes us feel, then it might do us some good to channel childhood fears again. Maybe worry about what’s under the bed, leave our poor hearts out of scrutiny, if only for a night.
I read in the paper that my brothers are being thrown from rooftops blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs for violating sharia law. I heard the crowds stone these fallen men if they move after they hit the ground. I heard it’s in the name of God. I heard my pastor speak for God too, quoting scripture from his book. Words like abomination popped off my skin like hot grease as he went on to describe a lake of fire that God wanted me in. I heard on the news that the aftermath of a hate crime left piles of bodies on a dance floor this month. I heard the gunman feigned dead among all the people he killed. I heard the news say he was one of us. I was six years old when I heard my dad call our transgender waitress a faggot as he dragged me out a neighborhood diner saying we wouldn’t be served because she was dirty. That was the last afternoon I saw my father and the first time I heard that word, I think, although it wouldn’t shock me if it wasn’t. Many hate us and wish we didn’t exist. Many are annoyed by our wanting to be married like everyone else or use the correct restroom like everyone else. Many don’t see anything wrong with passing down the same old values that send thousands of kids into suicidal depression each year. So we say pride and we express love for who and what we are. Because who else will in earnest? I daydream on the idea that maybe all this barbarism and all these transgressions against ourselves is an equal and opposite reaction to something better happening in this world, some great swelling wave of openness and wakefulness out here. Reality by comparison looks grey, as in neither black nor white but also bleak. We are all God’s children, I heard. I left my siblings out of it and spoke with my maker directly and I think he sounds a lot like myself. If I being myself were more awesome at being detached from my own story in a way I being myself never could be. I wanna know what others hear, I’m scared to know but I wanna know what everyone hears when they talk to God. Do the insane hear the voice distorted? Do the indoctrinated hear another voice entirely?
