Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

W.B. Yeats, No Second Troy

I am now nearly twenty years young, and all of them drenched in exhaustion. Simply and swiftly, I am running out of interest. Who would want any part of this? My life has not gone wrong, not much more so than anybody else’s—but even so, I am losing my willingness to engage. I am disgusted. I am disillusioned. I am another scorned and jaded thing. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what every person like me gets to be in the end?

I do not understand why we allow women to be treated like this. I do not understand why we provide them so little support. I do not understand how I, not even fully a women, have fallen into this paradigm so many times.

These people that I write of are not uncommonly vicious or cruel. I think this is just how most people are. I guess I knew better than to have ever hoped otherwise. At any rate, this feels worse than dying. Because it is so easy to be spurned or lost or left behind. But to be mistreated, to be stolen from in so many senses of the word, to face the sheer disrespect of apathy, and on top of it all, to be expected to stomach that helplessly, quietly, like the little girl whose father said he hated her—there are no words for that.

Understand this, please: the girl that I write of was a child. She was young and optimistic and naive enough to believe that the occupants of this world might hear her, and help care for her until she learned how to care for herself. So across this winter, she poured out whatever she had to offer, her time and her chemicals and her language and her skin, like offerings to an absent savior. She asked things of her body that it was not yet ready to achieve. She saw quite clearly each disappointment, each falsehood, each cautionary sign: but she tried anyways. What she was bartering for, with all of that unspoken sacrifice, was neither faithfulness nor longevity. She needed no endurance, no promises, no love. It was the mere lack of catastrophe she sought; the tranquil forgoing of malice or regret. She wanted to keep the memories clean. She wanted to recall, in peace, the clairvoyance of a body otherwise condemned to the wrenching aches of its grisly closure. What she did not understand (or perhaps knew, but did not want to remember), was that such a fate cannot always be prevented or foretold.

In a circle cast of salt, I saw iron links and fine-wrought silver: my history and my penance incarnate. Amidst clouds of heady jasmine, bright rosemary, astringent sage, I stared into the eyes of a half-dead talent. In a shower of crimson, from one clean incision, in ripples of water and tongues of pale fire, I asked for forgiveness. Then I awoke, really angry, for the first time.

We never left that labyrinth, though I have long sought for an escape. I always knew myself to be Icarus; but to him I was lesser, a mere Ariadne. In the brine of that Naxos-shored bed, I was a useful and knowledge-bearing object. But I was stronger than what he made of me. I always have been. I would have won out in the end, if I drove my teeth into him, made manifest my longings, instead of holding back and holding back and restraining what I really am. My madness would always have overcome his weak desire. Is this the truth that Theseus saw so many centuries ago, reflected in the foam of the Ægan? Is this why he allowed an ocean to come between them in the first place? Back then, Ariadne slept on; of late, I seldom have.

Whatever becomes of this body now, our history will favor my fate. He can have whatever else of mine he likes, and he has so far taken plenty. But this scarred, disfigured, fighting body, and all of the healing we learned it to be capable of—that is mine to keep now. Moving on is easy. I felt so fucking little to start with. But I still have not learned to swallow the fact that there is nothing left that I can do. I do not know how to live with the incessant, maddening knowledge that, once more, even with my father gone, I have been wronged and mistreated and lied to without any hope of any recompense or retribution. And I am expected to survive anyways, with no consequences and even less support, when the selfishness of careless men has endangered me once more.

It burns beyond all reckoning, to lie the precious memories of this year to rest beside some fucking parasite, who made of me another Penelope, who watched me fill a garden with moths. But the cast is changing now. I will learn a new desire: find a new fate. After all, not every woman left the ancient world unburnt. I am ready for a second Troy.