Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say
Chained to all the places that he never wished to stay
He was bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say
And as he faced the sun he cast no shadow
Oasis—Cast No Shadow
-O-
A dulled china teacup of coffee with a chipped rim, drunk only to the barest of milky dregs and left to stew on a cold table until the afternoon when the drinker returns.
You can't forget the sight of the moon if you remember the taste of the stars.
Calypso is a sea nymph, a strain of song or variant of ancient dance; the sea is art and art is the sea: they overwhelm and you cannot forget them; but Calypso you can forget; Calypso in her lost and lonely island is nothing but a breath of briny evening breeze, a single grain of sand at the lip of the shore. She is the waif of a girl with hibiscus in her caramel hair, a slender moonlit figure fading past as your ghostly boat is tugged away by the ocean in the dead of night.
First the girl, then the silhouette, now here only in memory, and then after that—wait a bit, let time do his work—forgotten.
When she lived with others, she had the company of the sisters the Hesperides. They tended the garden in which grew the fruit of immortality. She remembered the glint of mid-morning sun reflected off the golden apples, the same strain of sunlight woven into a lock of their hair. She had trouble distinguishing them: they blended in her memory—all lovely and the same—except for the wild one.
Zoe Nightshade she could remember; she had always spoken more coldly, her words edged with more fire than the others; she held her head a little higher, her back was a little more straighter. Calypso did not know much of battle, but of this she was sure: Zoe Nightshade was a warrior.
In time she proved it—though by then Calypso had already been relegated to Ogygia (a funny sound that ebbed and swirled) and her news of the outside world came in broken snippets from the messenger and the god of forges—she had been banished by their father and eventually found her way to the Hunters of Artemis.
Though Calypso had only seen her in her white starlight dress and numerous pearl circlets, she could very well imagine Zoe with an arrow in her hands, the familiar hard glare on her face. The world remembers people like her, after all, those who walk backwards or run faster than the crowd, those who stand still like rocks in a river. Calypso was of a different brand; she wasn't even in the sea of people, she was invisible to all.
To the first few wayfarers she begged them remember her. To the next she simply asked. As time lengthened like shadows on the wall she simply left gifts, small keepsakes like catching fish in the air: a hollowed out clam shell crusted with pearl shards, a fossilised starfish that still glowed like evening twilight. She vainly hoped that in giving herself away she would find somewhere to belong—the island was not her home but her prison, and you can never belong where you are trapped—somewhere where others would see her, would know she existed (and that was a simple wish, know me, I'm here)
But her visitors, well-intentioned though they were, had their own lives to live and their own stories to write. The withered petals of moonlace in a bell-jar were left alone on a cluttered mantelpiece; the coral was shoved unceremoniously into a dark drawer or lonely shelf.
And even so those dead things saw more of the world than she ever could.
Μου έρχονται τα παιδιά στη θάλασσα θέλω να δω το πρωί από ένα διαφορετικό αυγή
Ennui drove her to exploration. She could tell you, in time, how old a tree was by merely a glance; which flowers, when crushed, made for the best paint or could heal the worst of ailments. She documented every crevice, every nook and cranny. The messenger brought her parchment and ink, and she filled her silent cottage with her sketches; the walls were so plastered with crinkling, yellowing paper that their surface could not be seen.
Once, the messenger brought her a book in a strange language, one of the newer inventions. It took weeks (which was quick, perhaps; but really, there was nothing more interesting to be done) to learn it and when she did, and found to her joy that she could discover new worlds even when she she didn't know how to leave, she read in earnest: no, she devoured line after line.
Within books she lived a thousand worlds and loved a thousand people and she was where she was not.
She could not imagine how it had changed. Her last visitor had been an Englishman who had grown up in the green country, who lived in a time where the world hung on the cusp of a war that she could not comprehend. He had spoken of a world not unfamiliar; of forests and rolling hills.
This one talked of a world where buildings stretched towards the sky and stretched everywhere you look. No back gardens or even small plots; that in itself bothered her only a little, but what scratched away at her more was the sense of oblivion. How long had she been trapped here with the company of only the messenger or forger (to whom time mattered nothing at all, really) without knowledge of the outside world?
And this one had spoken of a familiar name, the half-sister Zoe Nightshade. While he was asleep she went out into the night to pick out the constellation. Now that she was looking for it, it was blindingly obvious. She twirled her bracelets in her fingers and watched the glittering stars. She imagined Artemis breaking up the moon shadow by shadow and it stirred something deep within her: an old, hopeless and painful longing for somewhere else other than here, to be anything else but an eternal prisoner where she remained unchanged, where her world did not turn or move but she could see others and they died and lived and she was here eternal like marble when the trees are bare with winter frost.
She did not change, she did not know.
She watched the boat sail away into the black and the gloom; lit up ghostly pale with the light of the autumn moon. Oh to live with the mermaids, to dance with the stars, to be anywhere but here.
"And I suppose this means you're free."
"I am what?"
The messenger shrugged. "Kronos is defeated and Perseus Jackson has asked for a reward: one of them being your freedom."
For the first time in years she could fully appreciate how wild the sea truly was. She saw woven sunlight in obsidian hair and a girl running across the night sky.
"But where do I go?" She whispered; now that the time to go was here, she felt as if she had no other option but to stay. "What do I do?"
The messenger plucked a plume of moonlace, marvelling at the silvery dust they left on his fingertips. "That's it, though, isn't it? You're free to do whatever you want, go wherever you want."
"But... I do not know where to start! My books, my flowers..." Her brain was all a muddle, all the crashing of a storm inside of it.
"What's wrong?"
She paused.
"I am afraid."
She watched the boat with its white-sheared hull bob gently in the waters. Only now on the eve of leaving did she truly understand the courage it would take to be free. The messenger looked around the island and spoke conversationally.
"Ogygia is beautiful, as I always say."
Calypso the music strain, the ancient dance, nodded; but she knew it was a beauty that she knew inside out, yet was one she could never truly understand. It was sunset; and it was then, bathed in ochre and pearl-pink, that Calypso realised: the beauty of this particular sight had been so often by her, but never truly felt, that it had lost its glow.
"It is," she said softly to herself, "but I never truly belonged."
And with that she climbed into the boat, feeling the swell of the ocean underneath her, a newfound gush of adventure rose up within her and she clutched a book of poems in one hand and a glass bottle of rose heads and moonlace petals in the other. She was ready.
"I will go to where the sea takes me," she whispered, "I will go find the place that I will make my home; and everywhere besides."
She looked back for affirmation, but the messenger had already gone. With trembling arms she tapped the side of the boat and felt it move forwards, cutting its path through the dark waters to a different place across the sea.
And Ogygia bade farewell to her last visitor.
-O-