Persephone

All the treasures I touched have turned to dust.
Weights drag me back toward the drowning pool.
A heavy mystery works against me.

This place has no meaning, no feeling of home or belonging.
A stranger looks back at me from a mirror before glancing to the side.

Did I stop somewhere along the way as my life went on without me?
I feel the weights.
I feel the weights.

Circles of hell I’ve always walked.
I see this now.
When I thought I was stepping out of one, I stepped into a smaller, tighter one.
One day I will reach that Center where no movement can be made, and there is no smaller thing for me to become.
Where my life and my death meet, there can be nothing left to find–
except myself.

I go to this center, to this lowest region of Hades.
I accept this as the quest set to me:
To journey through the deserts of corruption and emptiness while dreams of Paradise plague me until I reach some final Hell of Enlightenment.

Once I resisted this darkness as a shroud of annihilation.
Now I will wear this shroud as the robe of my calling.
I will look into this darkness as my mirror,
walk into this Cold Embrace, and rest my weary forehead on her shoulder.
Her smooth cool hand takes mine.
She leads me.
Now I will see
What she will show me.