The Palace of Eros by Caro De Robertis

Author:Caro De Robertis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Primero Sueno Press
Published: 2024-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Summer flared. Ripened. The sun grew strong across the valley; I dipped my feet in the cool stream.

My hungers had no script, no language.

I wanted—what?

Everything. All of it. To ravage the sky itself.

To buck against the blue, to surge with it.

To claim the greenery with the hunger of my thighs.

To live vitality in its purest, brightest form.

* * *

My tapestries grew ever more ambitious. I spent hours at the loom, and even more hours with a paintbrush in my hand, creating frescoes on the walls of our palace that brimmed with images of things I’d seen and wanted to see, pictures both fabled and real, fanciful or perhaps prophetic, evoking what was past and what might still come into being. I painted entire landscapes and then covered them with my brush and began again with another layer, shaping images anew until they sang, until the wall or jug or cup felt right, for I had an abundance of both paint and time. Or so it seemed. Was this how it felt to be immortal? Alive inside with endless time? I’d found a well of vitality inside myself and drew from it, not because I wasn’t afraid, but because the upwelling drowned out the fear. My vitality belonged to me. Every bit of myself belonged to me. Since birth I’d been taught such a thing would never be possible, I would always belong first to a father, then a husband; there would always be a man to steer my days.

But here I was, belonging to myself.

And to her.

To Pteron, who demanded I stay free.

And I felt free, in the palace. There were rules, but that seemed a worthy price to pay. I could circumscribe my life here on this patch of land. Why not?

What did it matter, to have a small outer scope to my life, when its inner scope was vast?

How deliriously happy is it possible to be? I asked myself, in the long stretching days, the liquid nights. Can this last? Is it possible? No, don’t think of that, stay in the moment, in the glowing heartbeat of the Now.

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