Art by Angela Bella Morte
Everyone tells the Persephone story the same way. Stolen. Dragged down. Six pomegranate seeds and a life sentence in the dark.
Somewhere along the way I started thinking about her as someone surviving in two realities. Six months underground keeping the dead world in order, because apparently someone has to. Six months up top, if she can even remember how to stand in the light again by the time she gets there.
I used to think of it as a punishment. Now I think it might have just been the shape her life, fragmented and challenging but she figured out how to survive it.
There's a me that goes underground. And down there I'm good at it, I won't pretend otherwise. Someone hands me a mess, a plan nobody finished, people with no direction, some already half-dead, and I don't panic, I just start fixing.
Tasks nobody wants to run, I run them. Work nobody else could pull together, I pull it together out of nothing. People notice. They're relieved. Grateful, even. And I'd be lying if I said that doesn't feel good. Being needed like that is its own kind of pull. Hard to walk away from something that keeps rewarding you for staying.
I've done this exact thing before, somewhere else, a different job, different people, a version of the same story, so I already know the ending if I let it play all the way out.
You get so good down there that you forget to check whether you're still coming up for the other half. I don't think the pomegranate seeds were some kind of trap Hades set. I think that's just what happens when you're hungry and someone finally feeds you. The eating isn't the problem. It's what happens after, when staying starts to feel easier than leaving.
Here's the part of the myth that usually gets left out, though. Persephone isn't just some girl who got taken. In a lot of the older versions she rules. She's got a throne down there. A name that isn't just "the one Hades grabbed." Demeter mourns her every single year like she's dead, but she's not dead. She's doing something.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Because there's a whole world above ground still waiting for its turn, and it isn't a rescue mission, it isn't me holding someone else's dying thing together a little longer. It might actually be mine.
It doesn't need me to swoop in and fix an emergency. It needs me to just keep showing up, again and again, in daylight, and grow something out of almost nothing instead of managing something that was already broken before I ever touched it. Nobody claps for that kind of work. Nobody claps when you water a seed. They clap when you save the harvest that was already dying.
I'm not saying the answer is refusing to go underground at all. I don't think Persephone would say that either. She goes back every year. By the end of the story you can't really tell if the underworld isn't a little bit hers too, at this point.
What she doesn't do, though, is forget there's a surface. She doesn't let six months down there convince her that's the whole year. She doesn't let being needed in the dark start standing in for actually being alive.
The gods bargained over her like she wasn't a soul with a beating heart. Half the year to one, half to the other, and nobody ever really asked her which half she would've picked, if picking had ever been an option.
A better life isn't owed. But I don't think it's owed to the underworld either. And it's something I feel I deserve and I'll keep fighting to see the light of day even if the underworld keeps calling my name.
x Angela Bella Morte x
