Ariadne After Theseus

Is there, then, no Beyond?

Is this our goal?

Is this our goal?

-from Ariadne on Naxos, an opera by Richard Strauss

Everyone always wants to know about when we were young and a little famous, and it's really the most boring part of my life.

My father is dead. The dashing young man is famous somewhere else. I don't know where. I don't keep up with him. He left me because we were young, and confused, and because we knew – both of us knew – that what I wanted wasn't him and what he wanted wasn't me, and leaving me on an island was better than trapping me in a new palace labyrinth in some rich house in Athens. He was doing me a favor. Really, we both had just wanted away from where we were, and running away together had been the natural way to do it at the time. I moved on long ago. I wouldn't even call him my great love. I wouldn't even call him my pretty great love. Honestly, we never even made love. I've never been with a man.

You are probably about to be my great love. Look at you, you. You're adorable. I mean it. You're as delicious as hot chocolate in winter. You're a goddess, to me.

Anyway, that's all there is to know about that boy. Let's talk about something else from my many travels.

Do you see this weird, squishy thing? It's a box and it's alive, and I think it's lonely.

I bought the box in my favorite curio shop, and the owner, whom I was supposed to call Hecate, told me it was a Living Box and all it did was sit there, waiting. It had a fleshy, squishy look to it – all pink and a little fuzzy like a square peach. It felt like a sausage patty with a heartbeat in my palm. I felt its tiny heartbeat. I watched the spidery blue veins beneath its skin pumping blood.

I filled this lonely box with small things. Here is a large, brass button I stole off a former lover's jacket imprinted with a cheerful anchor that always made me melancholy. (Minnie lost it in my car, and I had lied to her for weeks before the end came that I had looked for it beneath the passenger seat. I never looked until I was looking for a piece of her because she wouldn't return my calls. Did I ever tell you about Minerva? I will. I promise. And soon.) There was a fossil seashell collected from the side of the Anthropology building where I had spent days tugging loose my prize from the limestone wall beside my desk. I've kept that with me for years. I have no idea where my diploma went to, but I kept the seashell. (I haven't been to the ocean since I was a child. We should go, you and me. We should go before we forget about what we remember.) Finally, a snow globe from childhood assured me that Rock City was awash in holiday cheer and small bits of flowing white plastic.

No matter where I put my living box, when the lid to my box was closed, my box looked lonely. I gave up trying to put my box somewhere happy. I placed it on a high shelf between a ship-in-a-bottle that my father had given me and a picture of myself from when I was young.

This, too, just made me sad. My father has been dead for years, and my smiling girl's face has new marks in my canvas. I will never have a father again. I will never be so beautiful again.

Minerva – Minnie – would have said I was being superstitious about the box – which isn't exactly what I was being, but she was not one to parse details like superstition and taking something too seriously.

Minnie was never superstitious. She was my last serious girlfriend. She was a mechanical engineer. She folded her clothes, and ironed them, and even used a little deodorant-stick-like-thingy to take out tea stains in white blouses. I couldn't imagine a life more complex than pulling the clothes straight from the dryer – hot, hot, hot – and throwing them on slightly damp, and running to work at my computer in the bedroom. I never knew what to do about stains. Sometimes, in the night, I resorted to emergency club soda and it either worked or it didn't.