The Underworld's Queen
The story ends when she is taken; hers begins there
The story you know ends with a mother and a daughter dragged below.
It is a story about my mother's loss, and about a god's desire, and never about me.
I was taken, yes; the earth opened, and the cold hand closed, and the light was gone.
For a long season I was only the object of the tale, a prize passed between powers.
My mother mourned above, and the god possessed below, and I was the space between them.
But something happened in the dark that no version of the myth cares to record.
I stopped waiting to be rescued, and I began, instead, to look around me.
I learned the names of the rivers, and the customs of the dead, and the weight of the crown.
The that had swallowed me discovered, slowly, that it had swallowed a will.
I do not tell you this to excuse the taking; the taking was a wound and a theft.
I tell you that a woman is more than the worst thing that was done to her.
When they offered me the , the story says I was tricked into eating.
But I remember the seeds on my tongue, and I remember that I chose to swallow.
I would not be only a stolen girl; I would be a of the ground I stood on.
Now I rise each spring, and the poets say the earth rejoices at my return.
They do not say that I each autumn as a queen going home to her own .
Half of me belongs to the light, and half of me has learned to rule the dark.
I am not divided; I am doubled, and the doubling is a power they refuse to name.
The mother's grief is real, and I it, but her grief is not my whole self.
Between the world above and the world below, I have made a that is mine.
Consider how many tales end at the moment a woman is taken, as if that were the end.
Consider how few continue to the moment she decides what the taking will become.
My story does not end in the dark; my story learns to see by a different light.
So when the ground opens for you, as one day, for someone, it always does,
remember that descent is not only a losing; it can be a claiming of new ground.
I went down a daughter, and I mean to tell you how I rose a queen.