Answers on a Postcard: #17 Siren Song
Welcome to Answers on a Postcard, a newsletter about exploring the wild and wonderful world we live in. I'll be unpicking some of the big questions, sharing some of the answers I’ve found, or I'm finding, along the way as I navigate my way through life. Every other issue will ask (and answer) a few of the biggest questions around mental health, cancer, feminism, cold-water swimming and everything in between, while two issues a month will share some of my creative writing.
So let's get to it.
Hello! Happy Friday. I hope you've had a lovely week and are doing the best you can in these weird times. I'm going a bit off piste in this week's newsletter. Over the last few months, I've worked my way through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and I can honestly say it has changed my approach to creativity. One of the things I have learned I need to do more is show up for creative self fully (I know that sounds a bit wishy washy) and one of the ways I want to do that is by holding myself accountable to writing creatively on a regular basis. So I have made the decision to share some creative work every other week. From this week, AOAPC will be dropping into your inbox weekly, but one week will be creative content, the next will be the AOAPC you're used to.
I hope you enjoy this little experiment of mine.
The only thing I ever wanted was to be seen. To be comfortable enough to show my truest personality, to be recognised for that and accepted all the same. I wanted someone to look at me and say “Aeos, you were just doing your job. It’s OK. I know”. I wanted to accept that even with the hundreds, thousands of deaths that were written on my skin, I had never truly intended to cause harm. There had never been any premeditation, I just did as I was told. I just became what she had made me.
Before I arrived on Scopuli, I had spent a lot of time on the shoreline of my home, letting the days wash over me. I had always loved the water. I loved the way it felt on my skin, the way the waves licked the sand and left their glittering trails behind, as if they had marked their shores, letting us know we were just visitors. I had been young and hopeful and optimistic. I had been more handsome than most of the other young men and my mother saw the way women watched me as I walked, their eyes skimming over my muscular shoulders and arms, lingering on my lips, getting trapped in the shadows of my dark hair, tangling themselves in thoughts of gripping it as our bodies merged.
For the most part, their advances were lost on me. I mistook their attention for kindness, not noticing the darker undertones of their thoughts etched on their faces. I didn’t notice when they tried to stop me in the street, or when they tried to rest their hands on my body without my consent. I always seemed to move just beyond their touch without really meaning to. I was preoccupied with thoughts of the ocean and uncovering what existed beyond the horizon. I watched boats leave our harbours and dreamed of stowing away on them, to see the world beyond the horizon. I dreamed of forests and deserts, of lakes and lagoons. I dreamed of the images I had seen in picture books. I wished to dip my toe in the other worlds beyond the one I could touch here. I loved the home we had built - my mother, my sister and I - when we had moved here from afar, but I was called to the ocean again and again and again. My father had died when I was young, but what we lacked for in fatherly love, we made up for with motherly affection. She was both parents. She was unique in that she took care of us herself, rather than sending us off to a neighbouring man to raise us as his own. Mothers were rarely the homemakers, the caretakers, on our island. The matriarchy took care of the laws and the work and the running of the islands. Fathers were merely servants to the will of the women. I knew that’s what was in store for me, but seeing how much my father loved us, how content he was with his role in society, I thought I would make a strong father who cared for my young with an intense devotion.
My mother knew that I could not avoid the gaze of women for long. She warned me to take care, to be careful with my gentle heart, to protect myself from those whose attention could attract the malevolent will of the Gods, but I laughed it off, assured her my mind was too preoccupied with dreaming and learning to be distracted by the ways of a woman.
Then there was, as there often is, a woman who changed everything. She was tall and strong, her soul vibrant enough to light fires. Her skin seemed to reflect the sun and I was dazzled. She noticed me too but her gaze didn’t linger for longer than felt right. She was gentle and cautious. She didn’t stamp on the boundaries of acceptability like her peers did. Her kindness radiated like moonlight on metal. We were all better in her presence. She visited rarely, but when she did, she sought me out as her companion for the time she had. Stolen moments. Snatched hours. We were inseparable. We swam in the ocean, we climbed through the mountains. She made the island seem bigger than I had ever dreamed. Every experience with her felt like an adventure on a distant land. She took me to places I had never been and I grew in her presence. When she laughed, my heart felt as though there was a fire burning in it, a fire that could set my entire body alight if I didn’t keep tight hold of it. When our bodies met, they seemed to fit together as if they had been moulded from the same piece of clay. She came and went, but whenever she returned, she always sought my company.
Then something changed. The last time she came back, she was resistant. I reached out to touch her cheek and she moved her face from my hand’s reach. Her glow had faltered. Her brightness was dulled. Her eyes were not the warm caramel I had remembered from my dreams. They had dark edges and an unfamiliar coolness. It was as though another person had stepped into her body and left the woman I knew to rot somewhere, like a snake shedding its skin.
“He knows” she said. “I cannot come back again”. Her face registered no resignation, her words felt scripted, sounded alien in her mouth. I pleaded. I told her I was hers and she was mine and the man she was betrothed to, obligated to was not a concern. He could not take her from me. I had known about him all along but believed that what we had would be our secret. We could not deny a love like this. I was hers and she was mine. He had no hold. He had others who he used as playthings when he was away. He didn’t care for her the way I did. She was just a prize, a beautiful, gold-kissed prize to put on a shelf and look out, to take out and play with when he was bored.
She kissed me and told me she loved me. She left all the same.
And then I ended up on Scopuli. I don’t know how I got there, nor do I know when wings sprouted from my back and my long slender legs turned into fins. I don’t know when my eyes grew bigger than the saucers I used to hold teacups in a past life. I don’t know when I became able to sing, having never been able to carry a note before. I did know that it was him, seeking revenge for stealing her away. I was hers and she was mine. He knew there was no space for him when I occupied every ventricle, every vein, every sinew. So he had used his Godly powers to cast me out. I wondered if she had been punished or if her beauty and his lust had saved her from a fate such as mine. I knew the answer. Women were never punished quite the same as men. They were never held quite so accountable for their indiscretions, never held to the same standards. The thought made me bristle. I loved her still - but a whisper of anger tickled the back of my neck. I had been punished because of her indiscretions and she remained untouched. There were no geathers where her shoulder blades used to be. Her feet were still bone and toes. I understood this as clearly as I understood that I would never go back to who I was before.
I cried when I awoke on Scopuli. The pain of the feathers that had burst through my skin was too much to bear, the stiffness where my legs had been was impossible to comprehend. I felt heavy with the weight of them both. The others were kind. They bathed my bloody shoulder blades, still healing from the growth of my feathers, with water warmed by the sun. They taught me how to belong in my new body. They emptied cool water droplets into my eyes from blades of grass as my tears ran dry and the brain inside my skull hurt from the new pressure of the alluring eyeballs I had been given. Time passed. My wings began to feel more like they belonged. We occupied ourselves by talking, chatting amongst ourselves on the crest of the rock, watching the waves come and go, telling time by the tides. I swam a lot, taking advantage of my new fins. I tried desperately to fly but I was grounded by where my legs had been, my new limbs too heavy for flight. All of the others had been sent here because of romantic indiscretions too. Sleeping with a man’s wife. Loving a person with the wrong body parts. Tempting a celibate.
Sometimes Ajax gathered us all together and led us through a song. We practiced sporadically but the words and music came easily. I didn’t understand why we were singing but I did as I was told and I hummed the melodies to myself as I went about my day. Sometimes I had to sit on the craggy edge of a rock and watch the horizon, ready to call for the others, should a boat appear on the horizon. I never knew why I watched and waited, but I did as I was asked, because what else was there to do?
The first time a ship appeared on the horizon, Ajax called us all to the rocks and we began to sing the song. It was a beautiful, doleful tune that reverberated off the rocks, our voices carrying further than they had any right to. The others sang in haunting unison, while my new voice stumbled over some of the words and phrases as I had stumbled on my legs as a child, but I was surprised how easily I conquered the heady melodies. Before I arrived on Scopuli, even my humming was out of tune. My sister always teased me for the sounds that came from me as I tried to sing, always enthusiastic but never in tune.
As the ship came closer, I realised what was happening. We were luring them towards us with our mesmerising looks and haunting song, and as they came closer, their ship would smash against the jagged rocks that protruded from the choppy seas and prevented their ships from reaching our shores and the shores of the islands beyond. They were foreigners, come to take what was rightfully ours and we could not let them. We had a duty to protect the shores of the islands that lay behind us.
I saw their faces, the beautiful, eager faces of the women sailing the ship, hungry with lust and avarice to touch our skin, gaze into our eyes at close range. I watched as we distracted them from their course, their cause, and as they eased towards us and certain death.
With every moment they travelled towards us they sealed their fate. I wanted to stop singing, I wanted to stop the others from singing. I cast my eyes around, trying to unpick the expressions of the others, ascertain if they felt any anticipatory remorse, but mostly they were concentrating on what they were doing, rolling the sound of their voices off their tongues and onto the waves. Some looked distracted, some looked nervous. Some, like Ajax, looked ferocious and handsome at the same time, blood lust glinting in his eyes like a jewel in an engagement ring. I was desperate to stop singing, to shout a warning, to tell the sailors to turn back. I wanted to break the spell but the sounds of the shanty fell from my mouth like rotten teeth.
We carried on singing as the rocks ripped through the hull. We carried on singing as the sailors tried to swim, not seeking the shore or their safety but still attempting to find their way to the sins of our flesh.
I was only doing my job. I was only doing what I had been put on Scopuli to do. To stop intruders from setting their stalls up on our beautiful islands and pillaging our resources for their own gain. To tempt the sailors away from their objectives of finding treasure or taking advantage of the beautiful women on our shores. I hadn’t wanted to do it that first time.
But by the time the hundredth boat smashed on our shores, I was as ferocious as Ajax, desperate to see the waves slowly bury the women on the ship, eager to see the salt water fill their lungs and block the oxygen for getting in. I wanted to see them choke on the currents. They began to represent every unsolicited touch I had avoided on the island, every lingering look that had made my mother wary of my future. They represented the anger I felt about the injustice of a woman not being held accountable for her actions the same we men on Scopuli had been.
I was on watch when she passed nearby years later. I think I felt her presence on my skin before my eyes found her on the horizon. She stood at the front of the ship, looking out for the islands, navigating the way to them using the emerging stars as a guide. It was twilight, the sun was setting in the west and the sky was turning a rich blue velvet but she glowed as bright as ever in the looming darkness. I wondered if she was attempting to make her way to our island to discover another love. Would he be hers and would she be his? Would they bathe in the lakes together, would they sit where we had sat and would she run her finger down his arm as she had mine? She looked the same as ever, while I was almost unrecognisable. I was unrecognisable because she had chosen me. Because once upon a time I was hers and she was mine.
Fury bristled through my stomach. I called to Ajax and the others, who joined me on the rocks. We began to sing and I watched as the boat turned in our direction, veering away from its original course, our music too tempting to ignore.
I watched with relish as the ship drew closer, my voice ringing out across the waves. I was singing to her, for her and I could see the melody weaving its spell around her. The closer she got, the brighter she seemed to shine, her greedy eyes dancing across the skin of the others, until they locked with mine. I was unrecognisable but she knew me in an instant. Her face changed, lust replaced promptly by love. She knew me when I barely even knew myself any more. For a second, I wondered if I could keep singing. Could I really watch her die? Could I really watch her consumed by the ocean?
Yes. The answer was yes. I was here because of her. She had lived her life freely while I had been shackled by fins and feathers. She was free to roam the world beyond the horizon, to dip her toe in other seas while I was trapped on Scopuli, tied to the rocks, watching for interlopers, a slave to Scopuli, a servant of the Gods.
She called my name. She called my name again and again. And I kept singing, my voice rising in my throat until I was singing louder than I ever had before. I heard “Aeos” carried on the wind but nothing could stop my fury. The ship went down but she jumped from it, a graceful dive into the water before it sank. I watched as she tried to swim towards me, the waves throwing themselves over her, throwing her tiny body around as if it were no heavier than a pebble on the shoreline.
She was the first sailor to ever reach our sandy banks, but it was too late. The ocean had beaten her. I knew her lungs were full of seawater and I watched her as she struggled to catch her breath. Her lips were blue, her skin waxy, her eyes desperate. My name was the last word that left her lips. The sound of it made my shoulders flex. I stood up taller, stronger than ever before, my wings spread
I had been hers and she had been mine. But now I belonged to the rocks, to the sea, to the Sirens, to the storms we created in the seas. She had lost the right to call me hers when she left me to be enslaved by her other lover. And now, as the waves washed over her, taking her body into its depths, she was the seas too.
But I was just doing my job.
I was doing as I was asked.
I became what her love had made me.
I regret nothing.
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