"don't have kids if you don't want them." - a parent, while eating with their children at my restaurant
the sky is falling
the story of cyparissus
cyparissus was a young mortal boy that lived in ancient greece long enough ago that people were still quantified by their immortality
status. he was beautiful and loved
by the god apollo, who was pretty fluid in his sexual object choice as far as
gender is concerned. apollo
loved cyparissus— i’m sure the two had a lot of consensual sex that ended with
cuddling or meaningful conversations and not semi-awkward morning interactions
where one person is offered breakfast, but he doesn’t know whether the
invitation to stick around is genuine or born out of some cinematic post-coital
obligation.
in any case, cyparissus also loved a stag. it is probably safe to assume that his
love for his stag differed slightly from his love for apollo, but it is also
true that non-normative sexual practices where much less stigmatized in ancient greece. in some way or another, he
loved this stag a lot. when cyparissus
wasn’t having sex with the god of the sun, he was roaming the fields on his
native island of ceos, grazing his stag until the amber glows of late
afternoons melted away into evenings.
one unremarkable day, cyparissus was out roving the valleys
of ceos with his beloved stag. probably he was thinking about how wonderful it was to be in a
pseudo-polyamorous relationship with apollo and his pet, and how
pleasant his shoulders felt with the cool ocean breeze tempering the baking
rays of the midday sun, and how great it is to be young, and how he was never
going to die. somewhere during
this meditation, cyparissus noticed that his stag had wandered underneath an
olive tree and fallen asleep in its shade.
that’s fine he thought. i’ll go practice throwing my spear.
in ancient greece, practicing spear-throwing was something
like checking your phone when you are out to eat with someone and they go to
the bathroom. so it wasn’t weird that this was his activity of choice when he
found himself with a pocket of spare time. he ran about the field, throwing his spear at nothing in particular,
practicing. then, either because
he wasn’t paying attention, or he wasn’t that good at aiming, or he mistook his
stag for something that he didn’t deeply and intimately love, he accidentally
threw his spear directly into the heart of one of his true loves and killed it
instantly.
cyparissus was devastated. he was way more devastated than someone is when they are
running late and get down into the subway station right as their train is
pulling away. he was
more distraught than when you are planning to go home and eat some leftovers
that you had from the night before, and you open the refrigerator to find that
one of your roommates has devoured most of what was left. the event was more tragic to him than the
news coverage of a natural disaster in a distant country or the loss of a
grandparent.
he ran to apollo, who was probably off doing nothing in
particular because he is a god and doesn’t really answer to anyone. he told apollo what happened. he asked to die and apollo forbade it. apollo tried to sooth the boy, but
nothing could ease the sting of the trauma. cyparissus’ pain was too
intolerable for him to ever hope to return to life the way he had lived it
before. so he asked apollo to let
him weep forever.
apollo loved cyparissus, and so granted him this
request. there in the field, next
to the dead stag buried in the shade of olive branches, apollo transformed
cyparissus into a cypress tree. cyparissus’ tears flowed from his trunk as sap slowly draining to
baptize the ground below.
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how can you tell if an orange is going to taste good before you peel it? it's the twenty first century and i'm tired of buying foul-tasting oranges!
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