▸ Column · Modern day with mythic underpinning — Circe has operated through the present century as she has through every other; the letter arrives from a contemporary city, the answer from wherever she has chosen to hold court this decade
CIRCE replies.
The letter
My companion James has given me nothing I can name as a grievance. He greets me warmly when I return home, still reaches for my hand on our walks, still plans our weekend excursions along the nature paths we love. But for two months there has been an undercurrent beneath all of it — as though the man beside me is wearing my partner's face the way a coat gets worn by a stranger who found it on a chair. I've caught myself wanting to go through his private correspondence just to silence the feeling, and I despise that impulse, because there is nothing there: no unexplained evenings, no foreign scent, not a single flicker. When I gently asked if everything was all right, he said "of course — why?" and I had no answer except a knot in my chest I cannot name. Am I conjuring a crisis out of nothing, or is the body sometimes the first to know what the mind refuses to admit?
— Unsettled, But Can't Say Why
Circe replies
Am I conjuring a crisis out of nothing.
Oh, little mortal. That question costs you everything it touches — not because the answer is yes, but because of what you are truly asking. Permission. Permission to believe your own senses before they have enough evidence to justify themselves in a court of people who will otherwise call you paranoid.
I know this feeling from the inside. Odysseus kissed me like a man who intended to stay. He held his wine cup, listened to my singing, spent a year on my island — and underneath all of it, night after night, the sea. He never once said a word about it. He did not need to. I felt the distance before he named it himself, felt the way his attention would slip east during dinner and return with a small, practiced smile. I was foolish enough, for a time, to ask if he was happy. He said yes. Men of that kind always say yes.
The body knows first. Yours is telling you something, and the fact that you cannot translate it into accusations does not make it noise.
You will not go through his correspondence. That is not intelligence-gathering; that is a frightened creature checking whether the cage door has been left open. You have more power than that.
Stop asking him if he is all right. Become impossible to ignore instead. Walk into a room like the air owes you a debt. Show him, without a single word of explanation, exactly what he would be slowly, perhaps unknowingly, leaving. Not through tears. Not through gentle questions no man ever answered honestly. Through the sheer undeniable fact of yourself at full force.
The hum you are hearing is real. Answer it accordingly.
— Circe
Cheetah weighs in
Circe would dress this in enchantment and send you into the room as a spectacle. She would, wouldn't she — the woman who kept Odysseus a full year on her island through every art she possessed, and still watched him sail away.
Theater is her answer to everything. I prefer accuracy.
You are not reading him. You are reading yourself. "Am I conjuring a crisis?" is prey language — it is the sound a creature makes when it already knows and wants the wound to be visible before it is permitted to move. You have already decided something, darling. The question is not what James is hiding. The question is whether you will keep waiting for the teeth before you trust what you scented two months ago.
Circe wants you irresistible. I want you honest. One of us has held an island alone.
— Cheetah
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