tethered by the gods

When she was a girl, with hair in pigtails and bands in so many shades her little age wouldn’t be able to name, she believed we were assigned to gods. Those who roamed the earth, powerful strides shaking mountains, capable of creating life with their voice. She believed, with a small mind and its vast dreams, that each of these gods had a book. 

Leather-bound, creased edges, and heavy paper that fell with elegance as the pages turned. A book was assigned to each tiny person like her, and in that book, they held their stories. Stories that told and retold novels and adventures, mundane moments within each boy and girl’s life. These stories the gods held dear, small pieces in their too-large world, too long of a life, that kept them humane. 

When the girl no longer wore pigtails, her hair muted and buzzed, when laughter didn’t bubble out of her lasting and all-consuming, and her mind buzzed with harsh sounds and roaring rivers, she accepted that the gods didn’t exist. They’d left them all, strings tied in tangles so knotted and frayed that the danger wasn’t getting more tangled, but it had become freeing oneself. 

The rushing of rivers is all she remembers, yells and screams echoing in her head, and she wonders what keeps her tethered. She knows of the knots, the ropes that keep her standing, heavy limbs in motion, that are vital. But she wonders if it were for the way her body has evolved to move, not for the way lungs breathe and muscles stretch that would keep her tethered. 

The tethering of the gods. Ideas that rumble and swirl crash against the facts of her world. It’s not the words she learns about the body that keep her tethered, not fear that has her grounded in place, or that warmth she gets when others keep her close. Tethering keeps her afloat in the abyss of the sea, and it’s that itch she gets. Joints move one after the other when the pads of the fingers play against those copper strings, and the vibrations fill the room. She thinks that’s her vital point. The index that the Gods had assigned to her when she was still at peace. 

One string connects them all. One burnt and singed, cut and re-strung, knotted in so many places that no one can tell the beginning and end. Pages dry, brittle in their hands, no longer elegant with their falls, replaced by crunching of paper and the simple motions that keep them bound. She no longer believes in being tethered to the gods, but the gods keep those books, in the pockets of their sleeves, on the ink in their arms, adoration of the highest regard. Hoping the tiny girl with pigtails and daisies in her hair remains afloat.