#we obviously don't have much homeric content on their marriage before troy

[dionysism]

ohhh i am really thinking about penelope and grief. 20 years of it.

10 spent knowing your love is fighting at war and may die at any moment, every sunrise and sunset spent wondering if you're staring at the same sun right now or if he's already gone. and then the war ends, but not for you. it might as well have never ended, because now new grief sets in.

now you wait for him to come home, but he doesn't. and you slowly but surely hear about other great men making it home, and their tales of victory, and maybe you even hear about your husbands great trojan horse, how it won it for them, but you do not hear anything else about him. you listen very closely to the names of fallen greeks at troy, still, you do not hear about him. you wait another year, two turns to three, to four. nothing. no news, no closure at all.

you can't help but spin the worst possible tales in your mind, night after night. is he dead? ship shattered against the rocks in some storm? has he drowned? did he stop somewhere for supplies and get ambushed? cut down? could his men have betrayed him? did he anger some god and bring about his own doom? is there a chance, at all, that he's still out there? will you ever see him again?

and your son. your beautiful son who you love, who gets older every year, who can only know his father through the fragments of memory you can pass down to him, but it's not the same, not enough. and hero as he may be, what you would prefer is a husband. a father to your son. and his great deeds are somewhat lost now anyway, as he is. you cannot put a man to rest when his fate remains unknown— if he had fallen at troy, or made it home only to succumb to some wound or illness, at least you would know. at least then you could find some small amount of solace in him leaving a name and legacy for your son to inherit, some closure for you, but all you have is wind and words. and telemachus is starting to look like him, and you begin to dread him getting any older, as you remember you promised your husband you would remarry when he comes of age. another joy soured by grief, most women delight in seeing the men their sons grow up to be, but it only marks doom for you. sometimes you tell him to shave. just a little longer. he may still come back. you have to believe he will come back.

then the suitors decend like vultures, eating you out of house and home and every one of their faces is a reminder that he is not here, that he has not been here for a long time now. that you might never see his face again. you remember him perfectly, still, after all these years. can still see clear as day the image of him in your mind the day he set off in his ship, remember to the last detail the clothes you sent him off with. you can't imagine a life with any of these men, nor any other man on earth, but it becomes more clear to you everyday the gods must not care what you want. oh, how you both must be cursed by them, to be served such a fate! but you are not completely without hope, not yet. and so you stall, for as long as you possibly can, with your clever weaving scheme. and for awhile, this is something. you almost allow yourself to smile at the thought of how he would love a scheme like this, thinking about all the tricks and strategies he must have employed at troy, how you would have liked to have heard about them. ("well, here's what i would have done," you would sometimes tell him when he would recount old stories from his past to you. "penelope, you're brilliant! i should take you everywhere i go" he would usually say, and, you really wish he would have.) but he has gone somewhere far away now, somewhere you cannot follow, or even know about, and you are left with more grief than you know how to carry.

at some point, he's gone longer than you were married to him. eventually, he's gone longer than you knew him at all. it may seem silly then, to be so grief-stricken still, to love him so hopelessly, still. but you are only human, so you are, and you do. you've been betrayed and your scheme exposed, there's no denying your son has become a man, and the inevitable can be put off no longer. you falter constantly between a relentless despair that he will never come home, and fickle hope you are just a few more days from seeing his ship on the horizon. still, your nights are spent mostly weeping.

then this strange beggar comes to your house. he tells you he's heard about your husband, tells you he's coming home! and you want to believe it, desperately, more than anything, you want to believe it. but it sounds too good to be true. and yet, faintly, this strange man kind of reminds you of your husband. something about him you can't quite place. maybe you're just going mad, looking for him in everything, finding him where he's not there. but maybe...

and so here is your last stand, your last shred of hope, one final scheme. you'll marry, but first, a contest. a bow, that only your husband can string, an arrow shot through 12 axeheads. a contest conveniently leaving the winner the only armed man in the room. and if not what you ultimately hope, maybe, at least, you can watch these idiots sputter and fail.