actually the fact that odysseus knew he'd be gone for 20 years makes the gears in my brain turn. You kiss your son goodbye knowing you will miss every milestone of his. He will be a grown man and will not remember you. You will be a father only by title. Your wife will lay alone in your wedding bed, she will wake and see the side you've slept on is empty. You won't hold each other for a long, long time. Your parents may not even be there to welcome you back. You know you will return, but the war stretches on and on. Your comrades fall. Your ships are on fire. Your best warriors are nothing but ashes in an urn. But it's eventually over, you can go home. But still, there's more time left. First it's a storm. It's winding up in strange lands. It's hunger. It's temptation. Your men grow weary. You have twelve ships and then you have one and then it's only you on a single timber. You know you will return, but everything has gone so horribly wrong that you can't help but wonder if the fates fooled you. Everyone you know is either dead or are living again. You are the only one stuck in between. Neither dead or alive. You sit on a beach staring out to the sea from the moments the birds sing til the sun dips over the horizon. Every day is the same - you sit on the stones and weep, you trek the shores, during the night you're in her bed. Your skin is cracked and sunburnt, your beard long and tangled, your hair etched with more and more silver hairs. Your eyes are dull, sunken. Your bones ache when you walk, your breath is shorter. The sun rises and sets. The waves wash away your footprints. You are growing old but the island is the same. You are left behind. Your home will change and you won't change with it. In fact, everyone will change, but you will not recognize what's different. Some of the lines under your eyes will be the hauntings of war, while your wife's will be from the sleepless nights of buying you time. You flinch when you see each other. You expected to see someone else, and she expected to see no one at all. You could once hold your boy in your arms, but now it feels like he's the one holding you. The trees in your orchard have grown taller. Some of the houses in your kingdom are empty. The children that sat on your knees now have their own children on their own knees - or they lie dead, by your own hand. Who are you? Who is your son, your wife? You will get to know each other, you will change together eventually. But there will still be something off, like a brick not fitting quite right in the foundation. Off like a living man among the dead, someone who wasn't fated to die, but was supposed to die a long time ago. A dead man among the living. You will not belong, even though you are the father of your son, the husband of your wife, the son of your father, the king of your land. There will always be something missing, something aching.
