Muktai

“malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. This too is good fortune. How many have such power and leisure and defence as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. He sits with me in the green-smelling darkness, holding my hand. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years. Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. Overhead the constellations dip and wheel. My divinity shines in me like the last rays of the sun before they drown in the sea. I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. All my life, I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal’s voice, let me have the rest. I lift the brimming bowl to my lips and drink.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Perhaps all I hoped would come to pass, and Telemachus and I would go to Egypt indeed, and all those other places. We would cross and recross the seas, living on my witchcraft and his carpentry, and when we came to a town a second time, the people would step out of their houses to greet us. He would patch their ships, and I would cast charms against biting flies and fevers, and we would take pleasure in the simple mending of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe