I've Been Thinking Too Much

Athena’s hands were tied. Yes, she was a powerful Goddess, but she was very much a woman in a “boys club”, and the true offending party (don’t think for a moment that Athena blamed Medusa for being raped in the temple, Athena knows better) held all the cards. There was nothing that Athena could do to punish the true criminal, and she was expected to punish Medusa by everyone else. What’s a Goddess to do when she cannot punish those who need to be punished and is expected to punish not only the truly innocent party, but her most beloved follower? Use that incredible brain power she had to protect Medusa at all costs, and of course the men would see it as punishment, to be have her beauty stripped from her and sent to live in the shadows. Medusa should have been KILLED for supposedly defiling the temple, whether she truly did or not, but she was given the gift of life, and the ability to protect herself and her daughters (who she bore thanks to Poseidon). This is why Medusa’s image was used to signify woman’s shelters and safe houses.

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”

“I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.”

“I stopped going to therapy because I knew my therapist was right and I wanted to keep being wrong. I wanted to keep my bad habits like charms on a bracelet. I did not want to be brave. I think I like my brain best in a bar fight with my heart. I think I like myself a little broken. I’m ok if that makes me less loved. I like poetry better than therapy anyway. The poems never judge me for healing wrong.”

I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be.

I am a servant for my mothers unhappiness. I can make myself smaller, mother, I can become quieter. I am a wound that you can’t stop picking. I take scraps from dinner as little parts of love. I know that I am not easy to love. I know I wear my sadness so visibly that you’ve become ashamed of me. Make me small, crush me up in the palms of your hands. Destroy me for breakfast and devour me for lunch, leave nothing left of me, not even for the birds. Eat me. Eat me up. It’s too late to apologise now, sorry means nothing when you’re choking on my leftovers.