if you ever wonder whether you would have believed cassandra, all you need to do is look back.
on valentine’s day you called me, sighing at another one of my melodramatic flareups, saying: arden, relax, we’re always going to be friends. the necklace, you claimed, was a symbol of nothing except your desire to reference my favourite taylor swift song as a christmas present, and my breaking it was an accident, or the fault of the cheapness of the metal, or because i have a bad habit of pulling on my jewelry. and i let you talk me into complacency, even as your stories began to feature a cast i became an increasingly minor character in, even though i know what’s an omen and what isn’t.
four months later we’re not speaking.
how’s that for being a prophet? how’s that for no one believing you? do i get to be cassandra yet?
tragic women fascinate me. in my long list of tangles with greek myth, i’m drawn mostly to the women torn apat by fate, left at the altar of someone else’s convenience. helen of troy. cassandra. eurydice. i invent elaborate alternate endings, where eurydice finds her own way out of the underworld, helen chooses to abandon menelaus, where, of course, someone believes cassandra. every time i read, i beg the page to stop and help her. in my wildest fantasies i imagine an apollo who, upon being rejected by a beautiful woman, merely nods his head and continues on his way.
there’s more truth to the myth.
in the end i guess i wasn’t the person you first loved, and hadn’t been for quite some time. not in the sense that people change, although of course they do, but in the sense that our dynamic was predicated on my being the brave one. i had to live the life you were too afraid to, but when i became afraid too, well, you ran. i can’t blame you. i’m pretty vile when i don’t get what i want.
i think it worked because i want to be the brave one. for a time i was, i think. turns out my cowardice left me alone so i could write about this. you said we both would but i doubt you have. i doubt you’ve thought of me as more than a punchline since march. are you happy that you got everyone? everything? and you still need more, sucking the blood from my poems, your voice wry in my head when i click submit. you’re going to keep that line? you wouldn’t keep me, why do you care? you wouldn’t keep me, a grief-stricken girl doesn’t fit into your shiny, happy life, lines about dying don’t fit into my love poems. do you ever even think about it? or was i too cruel, too jaded, too wounded, is it better that you throw your lot in with people who have never heard you cry?
when you walked out of the room where we last spoke, i cried for ten minutes straight. then i texted a loser in my phone and explained to him that you were evil, i told jokes about how my makeup was still intact, i threw up on the side of the road thinking about a life without your forgiveness.
do you remember how we grew up in the forest together, how we spent hours upon hours of a youth that felt longer than it was on the phone, how we were supposed to be the maids of honour at each other’s weddings. i suppose you found someone better suited to you. someone who fits the role. you know, for all the flack you gave me about saying someone else was just a remix of me, you sure picked a lot of people made in my image. softer around the edges, though. i’ll grant that.
will you realize who’s writing to you when this shows up in your inbox? or will you delay checking for months, years, until you realize who the ghost has been all time? i didn’t want to be your ghost. there shouldn’t exist a universe where you aren’t the first person to read every poem of mine, but we live in it.
i felt my madness settle in october. my generational disease. my wasting warning. i can point fingers and assign blame all i like. i knew this was coming. i told you, in the very first instalment of this spanking new series of sadness, that i knew the steps by which you could break your own heart. and so i set about doing it, burning bridges, waiting for the moment when i would achieve the blessed solitude i had always hoped for. i told you that this was my plan, once, when you connected the dots between destruction and depressive, but there aren’t any constellations anymore, it’s just people tracing lines between stars that will never know their own names.
anyway.
i don’t want to be sad over stars.
i’m telling you this and you’ll never read it. i’m screaming it from the cliffs and you’ll never hear it. i’m spending everything i have to get the message across. i never meant to hurt you. i never meant to dig the knife in. i’m not your brutus or your villain or even your enemy, just a sad shell of a girl who always loved you and never knew how to dig her feet in to get you to stay. so i decided, like i always do, that it was better to have a hand in your going.
you wouldn’t have believed cassandra, i know that to be true, because i told you so a thousand times and you laughed it off. i told you i would make everyone i loved leave me. i told you i wouldn’t survive him abandoning me. i told you i was bad at love, so bad at it, in fact, that i would push away the one real thing i have ever known just to make my parents believe i’m normal. i told you i was a hack of a writer, spinning out over the same stories, returning to the same metaphors, incapable of moving on. i told you so, i told you so, i told you so.
being right is a consolation prize if there were ever one.
the only poem i will never write again is your name.
i think you’re happy. the glimpses of your life that come across my path more or less prove it to me. look at that smile, all our old friends taking your side, all your new ones clouding around you. i monitor social media like a hawk, scraping it of every trace you existed, simultaneously sending a thousand smoke signals for you to come back. hate me. scorn me if you will. never let me live it down. but for the love of god, come back. i cannot bear to be your ghost.
my fate is written. i howl against it like cassandra. i beg apollo not to curse me. i dig my fingers into my gut and try to find a way to turn time back. but you will never return, no, because i traded my years of loyalty for a few manic months, because i went mad and you left me and i’ll be mad forever, now. no hope. no turning around.
call to me again, eurydice. this time i will believe you when you say you are right behind.