Part II. Inferno Di Persefone

Time and again, the mythology fails us: our history grants neither justice nor peace. Look no further than that wayward child, led astray by a single bright flower, condemned to horror by the Other’s errant desire. Did she learn, as I did, that the darkness does not relinquish its subjects so readily? That there are experiences you cannot recover from, advances you cannot withstand? Some fragment of her lingers there now, nourished by the furtive seeds she tasted, taking root in the underside of her soul. She had fed, where her only hope was to starve. Now a part of her belongs to Him and I am just as lucky. Whenever I leave a hospital, a piece of my mind remains there.

Ours is the masochistic art of unbecoming. Down, down, down we delve: each level we descend draws us nearer to the earth’s warm pulse. Swept up in an ecstasy of terror, these bare limbs seize their motion from beneath subduing hands. Madness—my consort, her captor—compels us to dance in our chains.

At first, the blood howls in our separate worlds. We spurn the eyes that rake and rove. We rail against our stated roles; to wound, to witness, to obey. In plutonic clutches—the scent of dry sweat, the gleam of metal instruments—we revile the steady surface beneath our backs. In splitting gasps, something private and utterly shameful is unearthed, breached in thrusts of agony. She loses her youth to His savage ways, and I lose mine to the miracle of medicine. Both of us languish like twin fleshly sacrifices: struggling beneath the men we serve, while their conquest—their victory, their profound fucking cleverness—shivers its way to completion.

So when we fall to pieces, lose our meaning, break apart, we know to abandon the fight. Flayed and forsaken, the intricacies of our bones laid bare, we belong to ourselves no longer. We are lost to hands that are not our own, tethered to the savagery that lends us form and meaning. In the throes of some forgotten brilliance, of some solace beyond sanity, we lose the capacity for fortitude. Our palms are filthy with our failure, our mouths stained a thousand shades of crimson: communion wine and pomegranate, iodine tincture and slowly drying blood. Every drop tastes of inevitability. There is no turning back any longer: we learn to love our misery.

But that was three years ago. When I left, they swore I would be free. They promised I would forget that cloying haze. So I eschewed the blank walls, the grotesque factory, the shining cogs. I became apathetic and obsolete. Now I am deficient, I cannot love, I cannot be—but I still remember everything. I never stopped. I never could. I can’t not remember it, the blasphemous white. How wretched I was, the structures that were, the stone-strewn necropolis, the vacuum of disfigured thought—where was I, when was that, and why are you not with me? Which strange twist of fate’s knife brought me here—what cruelty, or memory, or mercy?

If she saw me now, that girl beneath the earth, would she envy or pity these bloodless remains? I wonder if she ever wished to lay me bare with her own hands: to strip back the flesh and raw sinew, wrench forth the slippery heart of our grief, unearth the cancerous core, wrest each chemical from the entrails. Or maybe it was I who wanted that. I loved her so much, I can still feel her absence eating away at me. I feed and I feed and I starve all the same, lost in her emptiness, gnawing my own skin: errant and addicted, I erase her into being. She was born of nothingness, without title or form, and in truth I hated her more often than I loved her. I resented her passiveness, her frailty, the way the world would shape her as she lay there, unresisting. I loathed myself and her still more every time she tried, and failed, to restrain me: to narcotize me, to placate me. I was afraid of myself. I was afraid that she was afraid. We were caught on our heads between jaws of treachery, nine circles down in the company of the faithless. When all of this ends, will she bury me? She has to. She must. Someone should.

How, how, how could you have forgotten? Did it not matter? Did you not care? How could you bury that, subsume it—you were the last, the only thing. You were what I had going, what I wanted and worked for. I can feel the brittle bones beneath your paper skin, my printing press, my opus. You bled my words, my ink, my shame, you fled some hell we found—

But there is nothing to pity me for. Because when all was said and done, it was I who left her in darkness. Once, she wrested rhapsodies from my tongue: her body was composed like notes on a twelve-bar staff, her candid eyes trained in a gaze I could not match. For this Eurydice, I mastered the art. I drew music from her fractured thoughts in torrents of tortuous, glorious sound; I learnt her mind like strings of the lyre. In her sycophantic melodies, I perfected the Orphean craft: to rise from sleep, from death, from madness.  My own sights were set forward, then, willing her to come after. But she was faithless at her core, and slow to follow where I led. So when I turned to face her, that look was not a loss. It was an indictment—a banishing. I chose to meet those eyes.

That is how it came to this, how our story starts and ends. In that glance, I made my choice. It is a terrible thing to know someone, to see them, and to understand that you can only love them while your fingers are on the strings. She was my best thing and my nothing: she was the cartilage of a dream I could not retain. So I relinquished her. I watched her fade. I will live with that knowledge for the rest of my life.

How could I have gone through with it? She was the only friend I have ever known, and I undid her. I prised each loving finger from my wrist: I extracted the teeth from my heart.

I cast her off in a fit of ascension. I rose: she remained below.

I unbound her arms from my neck like a tourniquet.

I tore her apart and let go.