The gods are not dead. They never were. When men speak to me like I can’t read, when they pretend to know more than I will ever be capable of, I can hear Athena’s rage. She’s in my boiling blood, in the sheer feminine urge to be smarter than every man I come across. She spits out facts I thought I had long forgotten, she revels in the way they quiver at the quickness of my tongue. She breathes down my neck when I doodle in my margins, reminding me why I need to write essays that stun me more than my professors. She’s engraved in my need to be perfect. Every diagram, every sentence. I don’t allow myself mistakes and neither does she. She’s decorated in neon highlighters and colored pens. Pages and pages of notes I have memorized, wrapped up in ruled paper. Headings written in calligraphy and PowerPoint presentations that earn me praise. I have a love-hate relationship with her. She makes me the happiest girl alive when I make her proud. She blesses me when I show her my straight A’s, she beams at every ‘well written’ and ‘excellent’. But the words she makes me hear when I don’t achieve the way I’m meant to, they hold the power to break me apart.
Aphrodite loves to play with my heart. She toys with my emotions, she gives me highs and lows, and she dances with glee at every new love story. Sometimes she’s generous, and strangers tell me how beautiful I am. I pass down streets and eyes linger at the brunette who glows golden. But sometimes she’s spiteful, and my face morphs into a mask I barely recognize, of mascara streaked tears and tired eyes. All at once she will deprive me of attention, making me feel invisible, unknown- irrelevant. To her it is all a game. She giggles with me when I get asked out, or when a new arrival shows up with a drink in his hand. I’ve met her in lust, with drunken eyes and lips that clash and whisper and kiss. I’ve met her in love, with heartbeats that race, she’s held me together when I shattered apart, heartbroken and alone with no will to live. And when I tell her I no longer believe in love, all she does is smile knowingly as the phone rings with a number I’ve deleted but still recognize.
Persephone adores me. She always has, she’s loves it when I’m not bound by limitations. Why do I conform to one aesthetic if the queen of hell is also the goddess of spring? She and I, we dance through meadows of flowers, both obsessed with the season of bloom. When it rains and I run out excitedly without a thought- she follows me, making sure I don’t slip and fall. She feeds me pomegranates and stains my lips red, and tells me stories of heaven and hell. She lets me ponder death, a concept so vague, yet so omnipresent, and guides me through it, running her fingers through my hair, bejeweled fingers entwined in silken strands. Demeter on the other hand, ruins my hair, but I love her for it. She knows how I much I crave speed, she’s the burn in my lungs when I sprint in the rain, with the wind howling in my ears as I urge myself to go faster and faster. We both chase adrenaline with a madness that is freeing. When I catch sunlight in my palms and fall asleep in the grass, she cradles me like a mother, telling me I’ve come home.
I know the rage of Artemis. I hunt those who hurt my sisters, I slay demons in a fury so beyond sanity, and I know there are parts of me that are purely deranged. I dream of blood and tears when I am stared at, when they make me want to cover myself until nothing shows. Every time I read stories of women, young and old raped alike, I think of a murder so violent it will be remembered for the rest of eternity. Artemis lives burrowed in my fist when I press my nails into my palm, begging myself to not lose my mind when a man squeezes my waist while shifting though a crowd. She holds my hand when I listen to stories that all my friends have, that my mother has that my grandmother had too, she teaches me how to sling a bow and shoot arrows that kill. When men make me feel powerless, I can hear her sharpening her blades again.
They all live and breathe in me, like sweet ambrosia in my veins. The gods are not dead. They live in women. They live in me.