i want to tell you about the first time a story betrayed me , Orpheus and Eurydice.

when i was nine years old, my english teacher made us read the story of orpheus and eurydice. i remember reading ahead of the class, certain i already knew what kind of story it was. at that age, almost every story i knew was a fairytale. princes crossed kingdoms, curses were broken, people got lost, but only so they could be found again.

the endings were never really endings. they were reassurances that if love was sincere enough, it would be rewarded.

so when orpheus descended into the underworld, i wasn’t worried. how could i be? he loved her enough to follow her into death itself.

that kind of love belonged in fairytales. and fairytales always kept their promises.

i watched him bargain with gods, he earned a second chance, and all the while, i was waiting for the part where they lived happily ever after.

then he looked back.

and she disappeared.

the story ended.

i remember staring at the page as though i had missed something, i read the ending again. then again. i wasn’t trying to understand it. i was looking for the hidden paragraph, the thing every other story had taught me to expect.

but there was nothing there, it was just an ending and i don’t think i had ever encountered one before.

not really.

and for the first time, love had done everything it was supposed to do and still failed.

and something about that hurt me in a way i couldn’t explain.

so i avoided the story.

years passed, i carried it entirely from memory. i remembered the descent.

the bargain.

the glance.

but i rarely returned to the pages themselves.

it felt easier

to leave the story where i found it.

the question stayed with me anyway.

why did he look back?

as a child, i was frustrated. he was so close, all he had to do was keep walking. the answer seemed obvious.

the older i became, the less obvious it felt. because growing up has a way of making certain stories sadder.

until i understood ,  the gods had not tested his love, he had already shown it. a man does not walk into the underworld for someone he loves halfway.

what they tested was something else.

they placed a silence between him and eurydice and asked him to keep walking. they asked him to trust what he could not see. to believe without reassurance. to carry hope without reaching for it. after everything else, the last thing they asked for was faith. they waited to see whether longing would eventually turn around.

and of course it did.

gods asked for faith, he answered with love.

and suddenly, the story became unbearable because he was only human.

when i was nine, i thought the tragedy was that he turned around. now, i think the tragedy is that i understand why.

because now i know what it is to miss someone, to search for traces of them, to revisit old conversations, to want one more confirmation that they were real and that they had loved you too.

and when i think about that little girl sitting in her classroom, heartbroken over a myth, i don’t think she was mourning orpheus or eurydice. she was mourning the first fairytale that refused to lie to her. the first story that whispered that love does not always arrive at the place it was headed. that devotion is not a guarantee. that sometimes people lose the very thing they crossed impossible distances to keep. she spent years avoiding those pages.

now she understands because some stories do not break your heart when you read them. they return to it, and break it again.

once when she was young enough to believe every love story ends happily

and again, years later,

when she became someone who would have looked back too.

Interior illustrations/overlays I recently drew for "Thorn Season" by Kiera Azar! <3