If I’m being honest, November was a difficult month.

I’m a dweller. I think long and hard about things that happened in the past, or that may happen in the future, and forget that things are happening all the time right around me. Between thinking of far-off events and alternating between drowning in work and not having enough of it, I spent most of November elsewhere, and that elsewhere was nowhere pleasant.

Artemis is my favorite Greek goddess, but Persephone, or Proserpine, or Proserpina, depending on who you are and where you’re from, is up there too. When I was a child I found her story frightening: one day, someone whisks her beneath the earth and tricks her into remaining there for six months out of the year. Sometimes she reigns above the earth, sometimes below.

There’s a duality to Persephone that, as an adult, is fascinating to me. I’m the kind of person who loves the transitory seasons best, when things are growing and things are dying. That she rules over death with the same hand that she makes plants grow–that’s powerful. I care very little about her relationship with Hades and very much about her, about her mysteries, her cult.

Her story is dark and sad and dreary, and yet I can’t help but find hope in a goddess who brings life forth from the dead earth. And yes, it’s another mythology story.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

VERNALAGNIA

(Noun: Latin vernal for spring + lagnia for lust)

A romantic lust inspired by springtime.

Persephone learns young that sometimes life isn’t what you do, but rather what is done to you.

She could shrink in the darkness, tuck herself away and wither from lack of light. Instead, she wears the blackness as a cloak and weaves herself a crown of asphodel. She is fearsome, she is dread, and in the spring her touch brings life forth from the frozen earth.

Pity is easy and life is hard. What some people often forget is that the light is made sweeter by the dark, and growth always follows decay. She can be victim and savior, both.