Waiting

Author’s note: This is based on The Odyssey and inspired by EPIC the Musical, both of which have taken over my brain for a while now (btw if you don't know what EPIC is look it up and listen to it, it's amazing)

Argos

Where are you?

When are you coming back?

Why couldn’t I go with you?

I used to follow you everywhere. I did everything you told me, just because I loved you that much. When you called me, I came. Where you told me to go, I went.

So when you told me to stay, I stayed.

Even when you left and everything in me wanted to follow you, I stayed.

Even after you were so far away that I could no longer see or hear or smell you, I stayed.

I stayed because you told me they needed me here. You told me to protect them, so I did. I still am.

I wanted to find you, but I stayed because you told me you would be back soon.

How long is soon?

I’m getting tired.

So, so tired.

But I can’t rest yet. I won’t. Not until you come back.

And you will come back. I know you will.

So I will stay, and I will wait.

Penelope

Two decades do not even begin to describe the lifetime I have spent apart from you.

Your face is the only thing I see in my dreams. My dreams, the only place I can still embrace you and hear your voice, your laughter. Where the last kiss we shared before you left still lingers on my lips.

It is enough for me to wish to sleep for the rest of my days if it is the only way I can ever see you again. If everyone else is right, that you really are lost forever and I should give up on hoping you will come back, then that is the only way I would do it. Yet even as my heart refuses to let go of you, I refuse to give in. If not for the chance to one day be reunited with you, then at least for our son.

I wish you could see him. He resembles you so much it nearly pains me. He never grows tired of all the things I tell him about you; if anything, they have only made him long to have known you all the more. Even now he has sailed off to try to find any news of your whereabouts. Even though everything in me wanted to plead with him not to go to meet the same uncertain fate as you, I did not stop him. He needs answers. He needs you, his father. Just as I need you, my love.

Even after all this time, every day without you only gets harder, and not just for me or him. The people have grown restless and impatient without their king, and they’re trying to take matters into their own hands. Over a hundred men from all over the country have taken up residence in our home, trying to persuade me to replace you with one of them. For years I have been keeping up the same trick to hold them off, but I fear they are finally beginning to suspect something. I have another plan, but the moment is not yet right.

In the meantime, I will continue to watch for you. Continue to hope that some day, somehow, you will return home to us, to me.

Continue to wait.

Telemachus

It shouldn’t be possible to miss someone you’ve never known, and yet here I am. Traveling all across the sea in hopes of finding out what happened to you—or even for the chance of finding you.

Why am I doing this? It is a question I’ve been asked many times in the days leading up to this moment, and I ask it of myself now, for the answer is still beyond even me. Why go to all this trouble over a father who may very well be dead?

All I know about you are the stories Mother has told me. She and everyone else say I am so much like you, but how could I ever be as great as the man who slayed Athena’s wild boar, or built an entire palace around the olive-tree bed he had made for the woman he loved, or went off to war to fight for her sister’s honor?

And could such a man so easily disappear from the face of the earth, never to be seen again?

You must be out there somewhere. If Mother will not give up on you, neither will I. I’m not yet sure how or when, but I will find you.

Just wait.

Anticlea

I am experiencing a nightmare from which I cannot wake up, one that no mother should have to face.

I stand on the shore, the same one where I stood watching your ship sail farther and farther into the distance all those years ago. The same one I returned to day after day, watching, waiting.

You promised me you would come back. Just like I promised that when you did, I would be right here to welcome you home.

Are the Fates so cruel that this is how they would allow our promises to be fulfilled?

For here I stand on the shore, the water lapping around my ankles as I stare out into the horizon, as I have so many times before. Only this time, something is different. This time, I see a speck in the distance, and even though it is not the first time, my heart soars, for it knows. A mother’s heart always knows.

It’s you.

The desire to jump into the water and swim to meet you threatens to consume me, but I continue to stand on the shore and wait, watching as the speck becomes a ship, drawing closer and closer. The wind begins to swirl around me and the water stirs, but still I wait.

It is indeed your ship, which is so close now that even though I don’t see you, perhaps you can hear me when I call out to you.

Perhaps you would have, if the wind did not snatch away the sound—or the ship.

The howl of the wind matches my despair as the waves swell and toss the ship around before my very eyes, carrying you farther away than ever.

The ship becomes a speck that the waves swallow whole, and although I am not the one who has gone under, I am already drowning, my sob so deep that it steals my breath.

My son, my only son…gone.

No.

If I cannot wake up from this nightmare, then at least I will not allow it to end like this. If the water wants to take you away, then it can take me as well. If I cannot be reunited with you in this life, then I will see you again in the Underworld.

For I cannot wait anymore.