Persephone

Persephone stares out of the blank look of February that flashes across my mother’s face; and in the excitement of a friend’s voice as she describes her latest medication, the triumph of her latest breakthrough, the despair of the latest setback.  Persephone is both beautiful heartbreak and ugly truth, and her fingers stretch toward me through the bare trees of late Fall and early dead-grass Spring.

She descends and resurfaces, and the joy of her return is tainted with the certain knowledge of her eventual departure. Like the bulbs that are also emerging from the soil, she’s feeding on the bones of the past, trying to make something beautiful from the dry dust of death and winter. Some years are more successful than others, but in the end, the bones will win.

I’ve seen Persephone consume the women she inhabits-She waxes and wanes like the moon, trying alternately to become large enough to encompass the pain and small or light enough to escape it.  Some days all the grains in the world are not enough to make her feel comforted by her mother’s distant harvest: other days, a pomegranate seed is too much, and a light snack is all that was necessary to trade half a lifetime of misery. These consequences, which seem so simple for others to assess, are impossible for her to predict.

Persephone’s tongue rolls the pomegranate seed along the roof of her mouth contemplatively. With its smooth surface and beveled sides, it is less like food than like the jewels embedded in her abductor’s kingdom, rubies and garnets that stud the darkness like drops of blood.  She bites, decisively, and the seed bursts, leaving stains she cannot hide on her lips and teeth.  The juice is sweet and sharp, and utterly unsatisfying. 

There is no happy medium, no still point of peace: just the unending pendulum from one extreme state of existence to the next, driven inexorably by the weight and gravity of fear and anger she can no longer express. There is sleep and despair, and there is desperate action and limited escape. There is the memory of rape, a regretful, neglectful mother, and a husband afflicted with the queer emotional distance of the dead. 

I blame Persephone for things that are not her fault, for the swing of the pendulum she rides, for ugly seasons, for the intense necessity of Spring cleaning, for the interesting, dark, and damaged men my mother dated.  Men who adored bugs and dirty layers of Earth; men who loved slithering in caves and sold shit for a living; men who brought her snakes and damage. Through her, these men taught me ways to capture serpents and charm lizards, how to escape the subterranean, how to immobilize the creepy crawley things of the earth.  Because my mother spent time ruled by plutonian seductors, I didn’t have to.

But I have to watch.  And listen. 

I’ve been trying my whole life to make it easier for Persephone, but all of the welcome back and bon voyage conversations are just a way of declaring that I am not occupying the same space, that she is different from me, that I will not let her in the way so many women I know have done, that the dark man I married is a living hope, and not a dead one.  I am not the victim she needs us to be, and I can move between these worlds at will- follow my friends, family, or leave them there, take comfort in both dark spaces and light ones in whatever season pleases me. 

I slice the leathery hide of a pomegranate, and find a studded section of skin, invert it, and stain my hands with the wine-sweet juice, bursting, like life, at the seams.  I take an unbroken berry and roll it around on my tongue- it tastes like a stone, the first jewel Ivan ever gave me, a garnet in a ring, that would not stay in its setting but fell and skittered across the floor until I found it. I bite down hard, and it is as sweet and fleeting as summer.  I peel a few more- maybe six, maybe seven, a dozen or more and I feed them to the Boy. 

You, I’m keeping.  You get to stay in the light.   You need no more dark, subterranean seasons.  You eat these- and all the other things I’ve fed you, ideas, belief, strange unfathomable laws- from my hand, and you’ve chosen.  That’s the rule.  It’s not fair, but there it is, and I can’t worry about how your mother remembers the story, or how many years she mourns your loss. 

9:50:59 PM