Human Traditions II Conflict and Chaos: Midea Final

Jason refuses to let me remind him of what I’ve sacrificed. Or the golden fleece. Or the
clashing rocks. Or the way his arms had wrapped around the small of my holy vessel; and the way his lips had met mine before unrequited passion had shoved itself between us. Or the Hydra.

I often wonder if Jason kisses Glauce with the same lips, and that if on the off chance I’d
get to feel his against mine, if they would feel the same as they did when we were lovers. Jason had only kissed me with sharpened teeth intending to bite and bruise; but when we kissed for that last time, I let the whims of our entangled tongues give way to the diaphanous cadence of a spark. Little does his newly betrothed know that my collarbone was shaped by the Gods themselves to fit Jason’s teeth, and that my skin was made to feel every sinking inch of them if he wanted to bite me; as men do. My skin has catered itself to his sharp tongue so that if he chooses to grace my flesh with such an unpredictable muscle again, I will no longer be afraid of what it’s capable of doing to me.

But maybe I wouldn’t be kissing that version of Jason again–

Maybe I wouldn’t be kissing the same person now.

Jason doesn’t understand how many times I’ve whispered his name at night as if within
my mouth’s reverberations of each stretched syllable lay baren a prayer to the Gods that he’d be mine once more. He doesn’t understand that I, at one time, had my own golden fleece to run my hands through- his hair rich and thick like the wool of the skinned God Chrysomollos himself. Jason doesn’t understand that I did it all for him- not for the fame, not for the glory, not for the story to tell. Even now I want to run my tongue over his teeth to see if he’d let his guard down enough to whisper my name just one more time.

My love for Jason has become a glass door that he refuses to let me through no matter
how many times I’ve waited and stood in front of it. But his betrothed walked through like it was her birth right- forgiveness now denied to me as its hot coals rot in the abandoned fireplace that is my adoration for a mortal such as Jason. I regret not smashing that door down, breaking all the glass with no regard to the lacerations I’d be left with. They would be my medals, monuments of open favor carved, bruised, and consecrated into the divinities of my flesh- proof of my immortalized love for a mortal such as he; a permanent impermanence on my conscious.

But maybe, no matter how this all played out, he’d never have me. I’d fallen for Jason so
many times that my definition of longing shoved itself into the palm of suffering’s hands.
Something deep within me knew that would be the last time our faces would be so close. I had wanted our relationship to end in some poetic twist of fate where he’d leave Glauce; where Jason would stop this wreckage and hold me, let me weep to the drum of his heartbeat.

But when I think about it now as I’m holding this poisonous flame-soaked dress, is there
anything more poetic than the resentment and anger that festers in the depth of a God’s gut? What is more poetic than anger? The way it’s raised ships from trees for wars better waged in a room between two people. The way it has bleed into my revenge for the pain Jason has hand feed me, the way my stomach boils when I think of how Glauce will burn, and the way I’ll forever know that Jason and I might’ve had a chance, but that he doesn’t love me now. That he never will, if he ever did at all.