The Hero's Discarded Bride
She solved the maze; he sailed away with the credit
I gave the hero the that led him out of the of certain death.
Without me, his celebrated cleverness would have wandered in the dark until it starved.
This is not in the song; in the song, the maze is defeated by his courage alone.
I was the daughter of a king, and I betrayed my father to keep the stranger alive.
I unwound my own future so that his might run smooth and bright before him.
On the ship, in the first nights, he called me the reason he still breathed.
He swore that the story of his triumph would begin and end with my name.
Then the wind changed, and with it, conveniently, the shape of his changed too.
I was left on an island the way a traveller leaves a coat outgrown by summer.
I woke to an empty shore and a sail already thin against the far horizon.
He did not have the courage to me while my eyes were open to see it.
Notice the pattern the myths prefer: the woman assists, the woman is used, the woman is discarded.
Her cleverness becomes his cleverness; her becomes the beneath his feet.
When she is spoken of at all, she is a lesson about the folly of trusting too well.
I was not foolish. I was , and generosity was answered with a quiet knife.
The hero sailed home to be garlanded, and no was ever woven for me.
Yet consider what a hero is, once you subtract the people he stepped upon to rise.
Subtract the guide, the gift, the girl who unlocked the door he could not open.
What remains is a frightened man with a sword and an excellent sense of timing.
I have decided to stop being the moral at the end of someone else's victory.
On this island, abandoned, I have begun the slow work of becoming my own .
I am not the bride; I am the woman who solved the maze and lived.
Let the poets keep their hero and his tidy, self-serving arc of glory.
I will keep the , and the hand that spun it, and the mind that thought to bring it.
There are other stories, and in one of them the discarded woman is not the end.
In that one, she rises from the empty shore, and the horizon opens toward her.