Benjamin, Jeju, March 2023
Niobe was the wife of Amphion and had fourteen children. She was proud of the fact that she had so many children, and one day bragged to Leto, the mother of the twin gods Apollo and Artemis, about having more children than her. This deeply offended Apollo and Artemis, who descended to Earth and slaughtered all fourteen of the children — Apollo killing the sons and Artemis killing the daughters. Amphion committed suicide in grief. Niobe climbed up amountain and prayed to Zeus to end her agony. Zeus, taking pity on her, turned her into a rock. She continued to weep even after this, as her tears seeped out of the porous sandstone for all eternity.
It has been a while. A long while.
My tears have dried — long dried. It is rainwater that seeps out of my unseeing eyes — rainwater that has welled and rotted in my stone heart. Not tears. My face and body have swollen and hardened, my eyes have become faint indentations in the coarse sandstone, my nose into a protrusion only visible from an angle; my arms molten and attached to my trunk, which hunched into a giant boulder.
My pain has soothed — numbed by unfeeling sandstone flesh, blunted by centuries of blind nights, my eyelids eternally closed over my unseeing eyes, ground by a world eternally silenced by unhearing ears. Yet the laughter of my children, their grinning faces as they run through the street, their small bodies and warmth as I took them in my arms, their cries as lethal arrows pierced their flesh, and their dying calls for help; all remain sharp and clear. Now it is all that I can see, all that I can hear, all that I can feel.
My heart was the last one to succumb to the numbness, as it refused to turn to stone and pulsed, and ached. And it was my heart that was the first to wake again from the eternal numbness — it was a mild pulsing at the beginning — then increasingly clear. The sandstone cracked — dissolving into some kind of powder that collected waist-deep, revealing the world to me once more — and me to the world. My skin had paled from the darkness of the stone, and it burned as the early morning rays shone upon me, but it was not painful. All I could see was blinding white; my eyes had been bound in darkness for too long to see in daylight, but I could smell the early morning breeze, and the young blades of grass waving from the soft earth. Birdsong trickled from somewhere above in the trees, and I asked no one in particular, perhaps Zeus himself —
“Has it been long enough?” Yet, as I asked it, I knew the answer.
It has been a while. A long while. Yet I do not think the grief had fled me, nor have I fled the
grief. The day may come when I may join my children and husband once more in the night-time sky. I believe that I will have to grieve until that day comes, and I must embrace it as it is.
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