Translators build the bridges. The chasm between languages is a deep ravine of silence. So what can we do but trust that the translators’ bridges are sturdy, will carry the weight of meaning from one side of the ravine to the other? But all these bridges are faulty. Hitches and chinks because one language cannot cross over to another language unaltered and unflawed.
And some of these bridges lead meaning into exile.
Which is where this story has been living. Far removed from its home. I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people’s tellings, of all these different bridges, of the wrong words leading meaning and truth astray, I’ll tell it myself. The story of how I got my snakes. It’s short.
Let’s be specific. These were the colors in my hair: wheat, copper, and mahogany. It fell in waves down my back. See it. Wheat. Copper. And mahogany.
I was this tall and when I told people I was this tall they always said, you seem so much taller. I was one of those people who seemed taller than I was. I stood up straight and I carried myself with force. I remember how I was.
A certain sort of voice tells the story long enough and part of you ends up believing it. In hearing the telling of my story, I have heard the words “seized and rifled.” I have heard the word “deflowered.” I have heard the words “attained her love.” The words have made me question, was I wrong? Was it maybe not that bad? Was I just not strong enough to handle it?
“Attained her love.”
This euphemism, this shorthand, this obscuring. Let me tell you. Neptune, who smells like the sick, muddy rot of low tide, forced me into the temple of Minerva. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked it so hard I screamed. The words for what happened next are not “seized and rifled.” Not “deflowered.” And not “attained her love.” The word is force. The word is violence. Violation. Force. Chaos. Force. Violence. Chaos. Force. Violation. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Let’s say what it was. He put his body where I did not want his body. This is the moment I was amputated from myself.
Minerva stood there and hid her eyes and didn’t help. Untouched, above it all, she was disgusted that this thing should happen in her holy place. This desecration. But she wasn’t mad at Neptune. He went back to ruling the seas. Unscathed. Unpunished. Continued with his life as though returning home from a morning’s errand to the butcher and the bank. Got what he wanted. Went on his way. Not me. I did not get what I wanted, and I did not get to continue on with my life. I was the one who was punished by Minerva. It started as a tugging, a tightness across my scalp, as though some large fist had grabbed my hair and pulled. My waves of hair, its rich color, its thickness, all of it tightened, coiled, twisted. I put my hand up to my head and ripped my hand away. Where there was hair now muscled creatures writhed and hissed, scaled and with eyes that burned. The snakes grew from my scalp like thick carnivorous vines rising out of the rich pulpy soil of the marrow of my skull. I became a serpent-headed calamity.
And Neptune rules the deep. He did not rifle me or deflower me and he sure as fuck did not attain my love, I’ll tell you. He forced his body on my body. A tidal wave of foul water. And in all the tellings and retellings, no one got it right. And my words can’t get there either. They’re closer though. They’re closer, I’ll tell you that.
And another thing. It wasn’t just the twine and snarl of the snake nest on my head. I deserved more punishment than that for the crime committed against me, vilified further for the wrong this so-potent god force did against me. So to look upon me, to see my monstrosity, was to be turned to stone. I watched as people’s eyes would fall on me, and the horror in their faces as their limbs filled with wet cement, curing, hardening, stilling them for all time in stony rictus. My hall is a menagerie of statues, an exhibit of a perverse and masochistic sculptor carving different personifications of fear. I was too much. I was too much for anyone to bear. It was the most terrible thing, to horrify a person into paralysis, to know, with every encounter, that I am a monster too frightening for anyone to see, or touch, or love.
I am so lonely. I have been in exile so long. So many other people have tried to tell my story. For a long time, it made me disbelieve what I knew was true. Now, I tell it myself, with the force of the words that I choose.
And the last thing I’ll tell you? It’s not the snakes that are so petrifying to people. It’s not the serpents writhing from my head that turn people to stone. Don’t you know?
It is my rage.
I hope for a day when a fury as white-hot as mine can be held by another, accepted, understood, maybe even shared. I am not optimistic and in the meantime the statues in my hall grow in number and cast gruesome shadows on the floor.