Everything I Introduce at the Beginning Comes Back at the End

“The great god Pan is dead!”

That was the cry that first fed the lie to Cleo. The fearful lie that brought with it the fallacy in the nature of impossibility that was suddenly shattered. If the great god Pan could die then surely she herself could die. The granted gift of immortality felt like it had been ripped from her fingers. Death was a lottery that she had never entered, it had never occurred to her that her name could be in the bowl too. Could a god really die? Cleo, bathed in flower petals in a bath drawn for her, debated that question. Disturbed, she rubbed at her face washing away the smeared paint that connected her eyebrows for nobody but fashion’s sake. Brown ink ran down the side of her cheek and she glanced at herself in the water, flawless. Aging was a flaw that unfortunately seemed to befall all mortals surrounding her but one that she thankfully lacked. It had been many a decade since she had seen Pan, been at his extravagant parties, or eaten his exquisite food but she had assumed that was simply due to his duty of godship – not due to something as drastic as his death. She briefly considered that maybe immortality did have an expiry date, maybe if one didn’t do their acts of godly responsibilities as one should it could rub off? She wasn’t sure, it felt like the sort of prophecy that would have reached her, but perhaps she simply hadn’t been receptive to hearing it. Had there been signs that she too had been neglecting her duty? Cleo reached her hand out of the basin and plucked at the papers beside her and split a reed over her nail to jot down the most recent piece of history to reach her ears: the great god Pan was dead.

Her role in the turnings of fate revealed itself to her in new clarity brought on by the only emotion that Cleo was still unused to – fear. Wide eyed Cleo felt the eyes of the world on her after that. The part she played had become the starring role of her life and she played it like her life rested on the results of the encore, because to the best of Cleo’s knowledge, it might do. She was indispensable and she needed to prove that to anyone observing her routines and scribbling. As the affections of the mortals and indeed the attention of Cleo moved elsewhere she wandered. As what she knew melted away into something new she occasionally took time to notice the negation of the things she used to enjoy. That’s what her notes became cheesecake, for example, that was a delicacy her taste buds and exceptional taste longed for. Infrequently, what bothered her was what she brought to it all. Athena had a city named after her and Cleo was just Cleo. The Romans had not taken the liberty to continue on all of the Greek ritual rites and instead made, what Cleo perceived as, very selective choices of who to worship and who to not. She was not a poet or a philosopher but after she saw the forests growing unkept, the brambles and ferns consuming and covering the ruins of Rome after it fell, she realised with dismay what any force can do when left unchecked

Apollo, she vaguely realised, had warned her of something like this. Really, Apollo of all people giving her warnings about the power she possessed, even after Zeus had made him mortal twice already. Mortals only really, died Apollo had told her, if all those who remember them are also dead. She simply dictated those who were remembered, but now Rome was in rubble under her feet, why should Rome be remembered? Rome, which had been the power of the world since it had formed. Cleo had watched with some interest the ever rolling drama that had infested the throne and the leaders of that civilisation. Julius Caesar, for instance, what a historical monument to overzealous conceit and all for a rule of less than a year. What was much more engaging to Cleo (and amused her a good deal too) were the little interactions between  Brutus and Cassius. In a city where she had had to shed her identity due to mortal ignorance, she found herself taking notes again. The Romans were far from heroic by the Greeks' (or anyone’s standards) but they brought the spark back to her perceptions, they also brought back cheesecake. Cleo had noted down a comment Cassius had made that held a little too much insight for a mortal.

“Don’t blame the stars for your shit Brutus.”

It deserved to be immortalised more poetically than how she roughly jotted it down. He did make an excellent point. Ultimately it wasn’t the stars that curated your fate. But Brutus and Cassius had died, just as Caesar had before them, fate it seemed had that planned for them all. Cleo watched on coolly, she took her notes and moved on.

That Rome was long gone. Now all that was left was rubble, colosseums, maybe the odd bath house or two, cracked tiling still littering the floor. Greece was too, the columns and temples, even the giant statue of Helios had long since crumbled into nothingness. The only thing that still stood in stone were the stories. Greece was remembered colourfully, the way that Cleo would smile at the scenery or the festivals, Rome was depicted for its might, its brutality. History noted them both with the strokes of thousands of pens and Cleo watched. It had been unintentional that these pictures of the past had formed through her musings, no one worshipped her anymore, ever presumptuous of her to assume her pages still consumed. None of that mattered to her much, Cleo had found a new afflatus - drama.

It was with the fall of Rome that Cleo first heard the whisperings. They seeped from the soil first to quieten the plaguing fear which had once powered her sense of responsibility. Cleo had finally taken a moment to pay mind to the trees, the roots and streams and for that the whisperings grew into a symphony. Nature had reclaimed the lands that the empires of the ancient worlds had claimed from her. That was Cleo’s sign that the cries she’d heard in Athens millennia ago were wrong. As the force of nature began to return, to flourish and recover her footing in the world, the symphony became clearer and clearer. The great god Pan had awoken, for gods do not die, gods merely sleep until it is their time to act once more. Cleo had never considered herself gullible but she felt in her soul that she had been playing the fool. The tantalising impossibility once more reinstated in truth. Gods can never die.

Cleo was free, for the first time in her eternity, she felt untied from herself. Who was she? The Cleo who saw herself in mirrors now was not the Cleo that had been painted on the vase murals. She no longer had to sketch on a unibrow to her forehead instead letting her eyebrows be happily separate from each other and she had a new ability to simply observe without pressure surrounding each note she took. She reinvented herself whilst she became enamoured with an artist's paintings. The artist himself was a solitary man, as she was herself, but he thought a lot about death. She vaguely wondered in Athena watched him too. Cleo expected she did. Many years later Cleo found one of her notes adorning a gallery wall beneath a painting she recognised.

“I would rather die of passion than of boredom.”

At the time of the note Cleo had been lying on a hay bale considering existence. Art had always made her existential. Far from home and far from everything she was accustomed to it made her question what she was really doing. Were her notes habit or pleasure? Was her face still hers even if it wasn’t recognisable? Was her name still spoken? Funnily enough, in a little flower field in an isolated country, she didn’t feel any of those questions held much weight. The impossibility of finding an ending haunted her. At least mortals could feel accomplished within their lifetime. The time limits imposed on them gave them realistic standards. What was an acceptable accomplishment for forever? Even without thinking she edited the events of the world around her. History after all shapes the present, mistakes prevent actions from reoccurring and she would have that effect for the rest of eternity.

She sketched a sunflower on a page of her notebook before getting up – the sunflowers wouldn’t last forever.

Very infrequently Cleo would hear an old familiar name, Aphrodite praised on a spinning stereo or a black wolf hound named Cerberus. Her history living on around her. One time, sitting in a concert box with her legs crossed and her notebook she had seen what could have been the slightest glimpse of Apollo. He stood at the shoulder of the main singer whilst the band played around him and the crowd went wild. A flash of a gold halo surrounded him as he sang to crowds of tens of thousands. That young man came to die too, but Cleo bought all of his records and whilst she listened to them at home alone in her room she took notes.

“I'm playing my role in history, taking in all this misery.”

Cleo felt maybe if it had been written in Greece all those centuries ago it would’ve been the sort of thing to be left at her shrine. Instead, she pinned the concert ticket to her wall next to her sunflower doodle, sketches, and photographs. Her own shrine to life.

Death had come to fascinate Cleo. It seemed only fitting that the easily achievable for everyone else would be unreachable for her. It taunted her with isolation just as the gods had damned her with immortality. It temptingly surrounded her wherever she looked but she knew it would never come for her. The life lottery entrance date had long since passed. Being mortal she realised was not a blemish to rubbed away in bath salts, or written away under the guise of duty, but the finest gift in the world. Only death in its all encompassing nothingness could give life meaning. Without such a meaning one would surely walk the Earth taking in everything and nothing simultaneously. An empty soul wielding an empty notepad. Her hair, face, and her clothes may have changed since she ran the Grecian woods but her thoughts had not. Although she had not aged physically her psyche felt like it had had to reinvent itself hundreds of times. She had been a hundred different people or maybe they had all just had a hundredth of her. Forever, it seemed, wasn’t for everyone.

She couldn’t go back but Cleo wasn’t sure if she could keep going forward. There was a slight tinkle as she spun her fork under one finger, thinking. Thinking was a very time consuming hobby and so she enjoyed it - she still hated philosophy though. Cleo dug into the cheesecake slice that sat in front of her whilst the sun streamed through the glass panes of the café. A true novelty for early on an English morning. Her laptop was long out of charge from the night before but she noted down her thoughts on a napkin instead. She didn’t recognise the French name printed on the napkin (something about ‘ready to eat’ although her French wasn’t perfect). All she knew was that they had excellent lemon cheesecake and she didn’t want to forget. In fact, Cleo had an interesting day planned out for herself. Interesting was a novelty for someone who had lived forever. She pushed her laptop into her bag, brushed the crumbs off of her blazer and crossed the street. The large building with its arching glass ceiling and rows of pillars was certainly a sight to behold but she’d witnessed better. Cleo wasn’t sure how long it would take to find what she was looking for but she wasn’t pressed for time.

She stared at herself in the glass casing facing her. How funny to see a piece of home so isolated and so far from where it belonged. It didn’t occur to her at that moment that she and the caryatid in front of her were one and the same. Cleo rarely missed irony but she wasn’t looking for it at that moment so it passed her by. The daughter of Athens stared sadly out of her case at her in the dimly lit room of the British Museum and Cleo started back at her. She looked out of place but then again so did Cleo. She wondered briefly if she missed her sisters, the other eight of whom still resided in Greece, as much as she missed hers. She turned her head and found what she had been searching for quite unexpectedly. It rested unassuming on a ledge beneath the carved statue. An ancient vase with faded paint depicting nine girls sitting together.

The little information card propped against it read: “the nine muses Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania share knowledge.”

Cleo laughed quietly, very rarely would the nine muses share knowledge and more often than not it was simply gossip that flowed from them like wine. She remembered the day that had been painted but not what the conversation had been. That thought both surprised and comforted her. Cleo felt as if she’d just gained the knowledge that she was capable of forgetting. So much of her history was intrinsic to her that she almost believed her memory to be perfect. Cleo smiled at the fact that she’d long since come to know: she too was fallible, just like mortals. Cleo wasn’t her real name of course, it was Clio with an i. She hadn’t had the heart to change it to something dramatic. Gifted the title muse of history, writing the story tapestry of the world, never to be forgotten. Ironically she felt everyone remembered her history over her. Maybe this was her gift - her freedom to experience it all.

Cleo turned her back on the vase and headed back towards the sunlight in the doorway. She’d let sleeping gods lie.