More Imposing Than in Life

"...my wife's sad ghost appeared before my eyes, / an image of Creusa more imposing / than she had been in life." -- The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Scott McGill and Susana Wright

I did not fall.

I let the street take me. There is a difference.

The city was already breaking open—roof beams splitting like ribs, mothers running with children pressed against their throats, men shouting destiny like it could still be carried.

I saw the ships before he did. I saw the long road, the foreign kitchens, the alien bedchambers, the outlandish hands, the ways my name would thin in another language.

It did not take much forethought. I loosened my hand from his.

The gods did not stop me. They simply made space.

You must understand: I was not confused. I was not struck down in some blind corner of flame. The poet will say I was lost in remote and unknown streets. He will say exhaustion claimed me. He will say sad fate made me stop. They will say the truth cannot be known.

But I knew.

I knew what it meant to follow him. To become the wife who survives. To stand on strange shores while men recount the burning of my city as prelude to their own glory. To hear my son taught to remember Troy as something temporary. To watch my husband learn to love another land and another woman than the ones that made him.

I would not be carried off like salvage. I would not become a relic in a foreign place.

When the walls began to tremble, when the cobblestones started undulating like waves beneath my feet, I felt the tremors in my own bones. The city and I always shared a body. Its thresholds were my thresholds. Its altars were mine. Its smoke was the smoke that penetrated my hair.

Aeneas pulled me along behind him. He thought he was saving me. He did not yet understand that survival is not the only form of strength.

He ran ahead with Anchises on his back, with our son clutched close. The future, the past, and in between them—him. There was no place for me in that procession but behind.

So I slowed.

Once, twice, enough.

The streets were no more remote than my own skin. I knew every turning. I knew where the stones dipped, where the dust gathered in the seams. I let the dark take my outline gently.

The city did not resist me. It opened.

When death came, it did not tear; it merely unstitched.

The heat pressed in; the sky split; the weight of collapsing roofs became almost tender. I thought of the Great Mother then, of the earth that keeps what belongs to it. I thought of the Greek ships waiting like teeth beyond the turf.

Better this, I thought. Better to root than to drift.

When I rose—because, yes, I rose—I was not the woman who had trailed behind her husband. I was larger. The fire did not consume me; it clarified.

Aeneas came back for me. Of course he did. Grief makes men brave in directions they cannot sustain.

He called my name into streets already emptied of it. He railed against gods he would later unquestioningly serve. He stumbled through smoke as if smoke were an argument he could win.

And then I stood before him.

He says, later, that I was more imposing than I was in life. He shivered. His voice stuck.

And perhaps I was more imposing. But I think he had just never seen me without the posture of wifehood. Death had removed it.

I was not ash. I was not wound. I was not accusation.

I was inevitability.

"What good is it," I asked him, though I already knew, "to indulge in such wild sadness?"

He thought I spoke of comfort. I spoke of direction.

"None of this happened without the will and power of the gods."

He understood that as fate. He did not hear consent.

"You must not take Creusa from this city. She cannot join you. It is not allowed."

Not allowed—by whom? He assumed Jupiter, or destiny, or some towering decree whose implications he could never hope to understand. But there are older permissions. I would not live to be a spoil in a stranger's house. I would not serve as a reminder of what my husband had lost while he built what he would gain. I would not become the quiet first wife, footnote to an empire.

"The Great Mother keeps me on these shores," I told him.

Let him think it was the earth that claimed me. Let him think it was law, divine ordinance. In his version, women are only acted upon.

He reached for me. Three times. Three times he tried to hold what I had already shed.

He says I slipped through his fingers like the wind. He does not understand that I was choosing not to be held. A ghost, as he will come to find out, is not absence. A ghost is concentration.

I felt myself lengthen beyond the street, beyond the temple, beyond the last unburned doorway. The walls collapsed inward; the towers folded; the cries thinned into distance. But I remained. Not as wife. Not as widow. As Troy.

The city would fall. The city would burn. The city would be told and retold by men who sailed from its ruin. But it would not be emptied.

He thought I was bidding farewell. I was anchoring.

He will cross seas. He will carry our son into legend. He will take another bride in a land that smells nothing like this one. He will think of me as loss.

But when he dreams of fire—when he feels heat behind his eyes and does not know why—he will remember my face as it was that night. More imposing. Certain. Confident. Ready.

Some women run toward burning cities.

Some women become them.