Ithaca

A small rough island in the western sea. Hills you can climb in a morning, harbors cut into stone, terraces of olive and vine, the kind of place a king walks end to end and knows every fisherman by name. Not rich. Not soft. The grain comes hard out of the soil and the goats outnumber the people. None of it stops it being the only place Odysseus wants to be. Calypso offers him an island four springs across, ambrosia, immortality, her own bed forever. He chooses Ithaca. Sharp rocks, wild weather, a wife who has aged twenty years without him, a son he has never met. He chooses it the way a man chooses his own life over someone else’s dream. [SPOILER: When he finally lands, the gods veil it in mist and he doesn’t know where he is. Athena strips him into a beggar’s body and he walks through his own kingdom unrecognized, sleeping in his swineherd’s hut, beaten in his own hall, listening to thieves devour what is his. The whole second half of the story is him taking Ithaca back room by room, until the courtyard floods with the fathers of the men he has killed, and the cycle threatens to swallow the island again. Athena descends in light. The blood stops. The wind off the sea is the same wind he left twenty years before.]