the space above my ears.

The Myths We Don't Retell

At the dawn of philosophy itself,

In the era of the Odyssey,

There was a plastic brain phenomenon.

A theory that the sky was not just a piece of paper peppered with holes.

The hypothetical five seconds of your life where you can live with more than only half of yourself.

Five seconds where you aren't in the back rooms or hiking up the ever-inclining dirt roads, gasping and thrashing blindly in the Charybdis's stomach.

We all stopped laughing at Socrates when we realized it wasn't a joke.

Orpheus takes one glance over his shoulder and it's over before it even began.

It was designed that way, you idiots.

You're only pure if you bleed mint leaves.

Remember?

We wrote it 127 times in a row.

I feel like everything I say is something that has been said by someone before.

Someone not unremarkable.

Someone more like Aristotle.

Clean syllables.

They ebb and flow like Poseidon's sea, grace further emphasized by the dizzy stream of hieroglyphs I speak out loud.

The tyrant comes home late and leaves his dinner on the table untouched.

He took a loan out from Dolos and he does not know how to pay him back.

When the ticking grows louder and nobody looks at you anymore, you'll turn around and fire back at them, bullets laced with embarrassment.

The broken boy is standing across the freeway, stacking up the lost limbs of the bedtime stories.

Over time of course, the leather breaks down from the sun damage.

I deemed it appropriate to explore the campgrounds.

I'm sure I saw Hecate by the well, dipping her fingertips into the shimmering water.

There was something about all the colors and the freckles that made me melt.

She tasted like pink.

As she is about to smile for the second time today, the connection is lost.

The clock rewinds.

Artemis gave the moon to Psyche and I, so we spit in the face of Apollo.

It's gone now, and his chariot has torched all of Greece.

He is satisfied.

And stuck in the sand is the perpetual worry that I will never love anyone as much as I loved you, because god, did I love you.

In the end, I was Sisyphus and you were the boulder and it was always meant to be that way.

The prettier sapphic tales never fit just right.

Instead, we'll read the one where we're trapped in the labyrinth.

After that, we'll read the one where Aphrodite lays on the train tracks.

Why?

Beauty is simply a burden.

Hephaestus lays beside her.

Why?

Because beauty is the only currency that matters.

My face gets hot when people ask me who I was.

Polyphemus, I'd mutter.

You'd smile proudly and kiss my cheek because I let you be Odysseus.

I let you be the hero.

Only, what happens in the end?

When you sail off, propelled by your own pride?

I will be forever calling out for Nobody, and not a soul can hear me but Calypso.

The silence of Ogygia is the loudest sound in history.

In the southeast corner of my brain, Ares is screaming for me to fight and Hera is pleading me to flee.

Tell me what to do, Janus.

Tell me which god is real.

Tell me which god is good.

Neither, they say.

Neither are real.

Neither are good.

Even Persephone wilts as the action falls and we frown at the pathetic excuse for a resolution.

At the end of the story when Icarus has fallen and his wings drift along the seafloor, she still does not know what side she is on.

Watching Daedelus grieve on the black-sanded beach, she does not know who she is.

If the movies are the epics, then we are the travesties that leave behind a bitter, sulfuric taste in their wake.

If you are Psyche, then I am Eros and we'll be forever arguing over who's fault it was.

Yours, for daring to look me in the eyes,

Or mine, for letting you love me in the first place?