RXO

However gold he shines, do not forget his fire...

The horses surged forward, and the world blurred beneath us, the shadows of night smoking from the sea's edge.

Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two...

Bold action and bold manner are not the same.

The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.

I was allowed license because it amused him, but I never knew when that amusement might end. You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.

What was the thing he would not leave behind?

His face when he had spoken of it had been careful, his words placed as if they were tiles in a fountain.

It was easy to speak so openly with him. His face was like a quiet pool that would hold everything safe in its depths.

How do you bear it?

Prometheus' words, deep-running as roots, had waited in me all this time.

We bear it as best as we can.

In a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

I watched until the last flame was gone, then went back inside.

A pain was gnawing in my chest. I pressed my hands to it, the hollows and hard bones.

I sat before my loom and felt at last like the creature Medea had named me: old and abandoned and alone, spiritless and grey as the rocks themselves.

I had scrubbed myself in the waves with sand till the blood came through... It did nothing.

With every movement I could still feel the prints of his fingers.

The wolves and lions had crept back, shadows in the dark... My flesh seemed to have congealed around me. My skin stretched over it like a dead thing, rubbery and vile.

When there is rot in the walls, there is only one remedy.

Tear down... Tear down and build again.

There were no songs to sing before a court, no tales from the great golden age. Yet somehow in his mouth they did not seem dishourable, but just and inspired and wisely pragmatic.

Do not listen to your enemy. Odysseus had once told me. Look at them. It will tell you everything.

Did he know how much those words cost me?

I do not think he could. It is youth's gift not to feel its debts

I asked her how she did it once, how she understood the world so clearly.

She told me that it was a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves.

I would not be able to bear it, I thought. I would seize him, hold him to me.

But I only embraced him a final time, pressing hard as if to set him into my skin. Then I watched him take his place among them, stand upon the prow, outlined against the sky.

The light darted silver from the waves. I lifted my hand in blessing and gave my son to the world.

Circe, he says, it will be all right.

It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child... He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened.

Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.