Mythos

There was something uniquely enraging about seeing the bold and insistent text of an unread email. Em had naively thought pivoting away from a typical corporate environment would free her from the weighted dread of a full inbox, pointedly mundane in its begging to be managed, crowded with promotional calls-to-action, patronizing tips for Monetizing Your Creative Spirit, and outdated horoscopes.

Em had mastered selective blindness for such things, though, making the one email from an unfortunately familiar and ancient name all the more impudent among the usual digital dregs.

You don’t have to read this, the subject reassured.

Seeing an email from Orin after four years—or four decades, depending on how lonely Em felt—left her with a deceptive calm; one she could have never anticipated in herself. Not in all her countless imaginings of how Orin would try to contact her after so long and repent at her feet did simple cool observance ever factor in. Vindication, superiority, and the satisfaction of the completed narrative circuit under the guise of closure were what fueled those unwavering hopes-turned-curses.

Em was no stranger to the sudden weighted stomach feeling or the creeping fire ants under the skin in front of her sternum, a practiced yet tired wielder of the gaseous darkness in her brain most experts called Generalized Anxiety Disorder. But at the sight of Orin’s email, she found neither feeling close at hand.

As if in explanation, a Calendar notification pinged on her laptop screen reminding her of the lunch date she had with her editor later that day. Em’s early drafts and theme ideas for her next collection pinballed amongst a hive of other metallic projectiles: wondering how cold it would be later, how maybe she was so calm because she was healed and even in a new relationship, and how she had to call her mom about the cupcake tray she had borrowed last Christmas.

While all the pinballs flew, one started to move a little faster.

More curious of her own lack of response, Em opened the email, that smoky gas evolving into a hidden mouth, lodged in the inside of the occiput. It hissed that the impulse was merely to clear up the Inbox back to zero, as always, that was all.

It was just a regular Tuesday.

“Em - I hope you’re doing well.”

The instinctive mundanity of such an opening tickled Em’s petulant ego.

They always come crawling back, she thought, a mimic of a girl-boss, main character she had once seen on TV during the times she hadn’t had the energy to wash her hair.

Duly fed by idea alone, Em got comfortable in her desk chair with her cooling morning coffee to read further.

“I saw that you recently got to go to Amsterdam. I’m so glad you finally made it there!”

Em grimaced down at her coffee, realizing she must have put in more sugar than usual. It had been a while since she had made that mistake, or at the very least hadn’t picked up on it before taking the sip. Her nose usually caught the additional, unwelcome granules before the coffee ever reached her tongue.

The fast pinball ricocheted toward the hidden mouth.

“I know it may seem silly to start with something I saw on socials, but it’s been a long time and there’s no way around the awkwardness is there?”

Travel, music, and animals, was what Oren’s dating profile interests had said. Em wondered if it still said that, fingertips finding solace along the soft crenulations of the scroll button on their mouse, sweet coffee dripping down her throat.

“Not really sure what could be considered silly in our thirties. So there’s no other way to say I’m sorry than just saying it: I am so sorry, Em, for the distress and pain I caused you back then.”

Em had barely finished reading the sentence before opening the Message app on her computer.

“U WILL NOT FUCKIN BELIEVEWHO JUST FUCKIN EMAILED ME” was out of her fingers like a spell before consciousness caught up to them. Em frowned down at her hands, the same ones that have written many a poem, email, letter, and message of varying urgencies. It was rare for them to betray her.

Broken teeth clenched around the fast pinball.

“Look I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I know it’s been so long and we haven’t spoken and you probably don’t want anything to do with me. I’m not apologizing thinking it will change anything. It just felt like the right thing to do, so I hope you can indulge me even for a second.

I don’t know if you remember, but when we met, I had just gotten out of rehab. Even now, I’m glad that we didn’t rush into things. You were right to be cautious, and I was… let’s just say, fragile.

Anyways, I’m not apologizing because I was a mess, or because I didn’t know how to accept that someone like you could possibly care about me, or because I’m off the wagon and doing my apology tour.

I’m apologizing because I’m getting married.”

A spritely series of dings pulled Em’s eyes away to scan over vibrant “WHAT”s punctuating the feeding frenzy over an old flame revisiting them all by proxy.

Em put her mug down, tonguing the film of grainy, over sweetened coffee on her teeth, blaming it for how dry the inside of her mouth, her head, felt.

Married.

“Don’t worry, I’m not asking you for anything, I’m just saying my piece since I think when something new begins, you have to mourn everything that came before. And I don’t think I ever properly did that when it came to you.”

Our wedding song should be “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith, she had once said to him. He had only known it from that “one space movie.” He had claimed playfully, yet with a tinge of realism, that he only listened to “real music.”

Even back then she had known that the nature of their relationship was to do with Missing. Missing time. Missing him. Missing sleep. Missing connection.

“You once said my depression and inability to believe that you loved me was selfish. I hated you for a long time for that, because you were right. You always had a tendency to be like that.”

Em shifted uncomfortably in her chair, swallowing the small knot of the noose hanging down her throat toward her beating heart. She had been so frustrated and angry and tired by the time she accused him of hurting her with the same switch he flagellated himself with. She had always thought it was ritualistic how much he had worshipped his own self-hatred.

It was only later when Em—on a random Tuesday—would remember how nonchalant he had always been in the tattoo parlor chair, but a single paper cut would be the source of his focused anguish until it healed. And it was then that Em had considered what punishment looked like for someone covered in paper cuts, accumulated over time. What did penance, redemption, forgiveness look like for that someone?

The skin around her sinuses felt tight.

She would only have an hour or so to get to her lunch appointment, whizzed one pinball. Another clunked behind her forehead about how reviewers had praised the “rawness” of her debut work, bouncing off a smaller missile in the shape of a bullet marked: “sophomore slump.”

Past broken teeth, the hidden mouth’s charred and forked tongue wrapped around the fast pinball.

“I left you because I never felt good enough for you, and in a lot of ways I wasn’t. The more you told me you would be there for me, the more I knew I had to get away from you. That might not make sense to you but it’s how I felt at the time. It was all that made sense to me at the time.”

At the time, Em had spent countless nights, cradling a shivering and beaten pulp, soaking her brain in turn with a saccharine, red resentment, thrumming at every even breath he managed to make: When, will, it, be, my, turn?

“I’ve learned a lot since then—for better or for worse—and have lost and gained quite a bit in the past four years. But I always remembered everything you ever taught and showed me during our time together. How attentive and kind and selfless you were with me. It’s because of you that I became someone worth a damn to myself. And for someone like my fiancée, Desi.

I’m not gonna say some bullshit about how I think you’d like her— but Hell, a part of me does think that you would be happy with what I’ve made of myself and the choices I’ve made since. And there isn’t any way for me to thank you enough for showing me what it meant to unconditionally love and receive— to show the fuck up, to do the work, and to choose to keeping going every day. You did that for me.”

Collateral damage had been her first collection of poems published a year after Orin left her. She had dedicated it to him because she knew he didn’t read poetry and wouldn’t see that the dedication was just a politically veiled accusation.

With a chorus of plings from the prying group chat she herself had apparently summoned swirling in her ears like tinnitus, she felt cold and absently noted to turn the thermostat up once she was done.

Though with how unfocused her eyes started to feel, she wasn’t altogether sure when “done” would be. The eerie haunt in her brain rattled the pinball at the back door like a shaking beggar’s cup, igniting and alarming the nerves.

“It’s selfish of me to tell you all this now, I know that. But it’s honest. And sometimes gratitude hurts.

So— what I want to apologize for, Em, is for not being the one for you. I think we both knew it throughout the relationship. But you still chose me over and over again. And I’m sorry for not choosing you back, even when we were together. I’m sorry that you found me when you did. When I wasn’t ready. I was stubborn. I was not well. I’m sorry that whatever pain I caused in the fallout made you ever feel like I had been a waste of time and energy. A waste of your love. I hope you know it wasn’t.

Let me not presume - it’s possible that you never felt that! Or if you had, you are well past it now. But the truth is, I don’t think I was past it. Not until Desi. I don’t think I appreciated what a gift knowing you, learning from you, and being loved by you did for me. And for that—that especially—too late but still true—I am so deeply sorry.”

Tears did not come. Em felt the pillars of salt, frozen, watching coolly from the depths of her eyes. The pinball rattled on.

“This is not something I deserve forgiveness for and have accepted it as a regret, a millstone (one of many) to carry until my death. But I welcome it because it’s a marker for what you’ve done for me, regardless of whether you felt like you did anything at all. If there’s nothing else in this life, or ever a time you feel that you didn’t do enough for yourself or for others, I hope there’s some solace in that you simply being you changed me for good.

It’s not nothing, and certainly not everything. But it’s something. Right?

I would tell you to take care, but I know you will. You simply can’t help it.

You don’t need me to tell you how incredible of a person you are or hear my thank yous or my apologies. But thank you anyway, for reading my apology.

Always,

Orin”

“Never look back,” had been something her friends had repeatedly chanted at her, underlined by other such mantras in self-help books about success and heartbreak. Em had always obliged with the begrudging obedience of a child, preferring any activity over the endless plague of silver gnats that kept her awake at night that sounded deceptively like, “what if, what if?”

Even now, after so long, the buzzing in her ear fed her another slug, more barbed though just as shiny, about how she had argued with Orin about how stupid and senseless the Orpheus and Eurydice myth was. Because he only had one job and he failed her.

But in the core of that barb, small and quiet, was the fact, still, that she longed to turn back. Have him turn to look at her, too, against all better judgment, just because he couldn’t bear to not.

Whether she felt her hand disintegrate into his or she pulled it away herself, either way, she would return to Hell. And some nights, Orin was the viper that sent her there.

The toxic and acrid smoke crowded at the windows of her eyes, gleeful in its inevitable poison leaking in her blood, jumpstarting the body, quivering with the perpetual jingle-jangle of, “what if, what if, he’s a liar, a liar, a thief of time and space. Too late, too late, we only have each other now.”

Ringing ears, melted salt pillars, and a single, clanging pinball moving so fast it could be mistaken for dozens, Em shut her eyes and held herself tight, breathing in deeply as she contained herself between firm yet wavering hands; the very root of her own salvation and ascension into herself.

Too late, too late, we only have each other now.

She let the air slide out of her as it always did, reliable and constant until it someday wouldn’t be, a threat and a promise.

Rhythmic taps to her forearms drowned out the incessant clattering and even dulled the impact of the usual whistling missives back down to a comfortable drone. 

Orpheus and Eurydice. Mythology. Lies. Or lessons.

Do all stories need a moral? 

She could hear the broken teeth grinding, farther away, forked tongue no longer thrashing, somewhere past the heavy veil.

It was worth bringing up at lunch. 

She held herself like that, like she had many times before, soaked in a saccharine, red resentment, thrumming at every even breath she made, until it turned quiet and black as obsidian again, a hue that looked like grief or peace depending how the light shimmered along it. Her own millstone changed shape and size, and today it felt warmer and heavier against her chest, shrunken down to the size of a pinball.

Comforted, Em, once a mere character of myth, knew she was now the viperous mouth of Virgil.