The Cassandra Consequence: An Allegory of "Higher" Education

He seemed to love me monolithically.

He stood around me, the promises and gifts, stone by stone, building us in together, building them out, he and I, building us upwards floor by floor in a flood, a babble of seductive prose.

We had started in a crowd, dancing in the grass on miles of gently rolling hills, the atoms bouncing cheerful, in and out of our lungs. We bounced in and out of our lungs, talking our souls. At least, I talking mine, and they talking theirs, but he was a god among mortals, incognito. Gods cannot speak their souls. These stone gods have no souls. I think they had them once, but found them uncomfortable things, and so ripped them out.

How to describe the way his sunshine slowly burnt my skin, and the way his color rubbed off on mine, the way people could see it even when he was not near, the way it ran out of the corner of my mouth when I spoke and nobody heard the words for watching the way it dyed me! They moved back. They made space. And in that clearing, he began to build my tower. And they moved further when I tried to reach through. They shuddered and shrugged and turned away, and so I stayed. I let him build me up.

And when it was roofed, floored, walled, when it was solid he showed me the library. What woman is not weak for the promise of knowledge, and hungry for someone else's thoughts to feed the fire of her own? And when I had read all the books, listening to the sussurrus of their flattery, being kissed by their forked tongues, and stroking their elegant spines, he sat beside me and gave me one more thing: the key to the library of all the books that had never been written.

A book that has never been written is a thing of great tenderness. It is a growing thing, a tree, a weed, or a child. They are seeds and ovum and rich with more promises than even a god's mouth can speak. And I knew that some of them were mine, my creatures, my sick little roses.

And timidly, as an insecure lover, he asked for only one thing, one sign that I loved him, too. He asked for me. Bless him for asking: so many don't. So many simply steal a person, consume them, and then leave them bewildered, broken, and aching. He only pointed at the walls, at the tower he had built, at the library, at the soft furnishings, at what I owed him, and held out his hand for mine. Not cruelly, but tenderly, kindly, with soft eyes sure now that I would make myself just a little smaller and crawl into them forever.

I had absorbed as much of his fire, as much of his indigestible soul as a person can. I was learning how the love of a petty god changes us, offering some unrecognizable perpetuity in place of progress. I had read his library, and had seen all that had gone before, every seduction of a mortal by a god. I could forever be a tree, or a constellation, or a fountain. I did not need to open the will-be books. Here, to hand, was Ovid. I took it up instead, and with it, death.

So he turned me out, finally, taking every stone and leaving me to the empty atoms, to feel mortal among the other mortals. He did not ask for the key to the books that had never been written, the would-be, the will-be, the must-be: I swallowed it. He just laughed.

I descended the stairs and walked in the grass again. But my feet were calloused. The people lived on grass, shoeless. I climbed the rocks to look out over the sea, but they never looked up or followed me. I waded into the ocean, but they never looked down. Here was plenty of soft grass, beneath them. They could not walk on stone, or sand, or gravel: they did not want to. I made them shoes, but nobody would try them, and when I begged them to listen, they laughed. They mocked my noises, or furrowed their brows. In their voices I understood not a single word, but only heard Apollo laughing.

I have the keys to the library of might-be-someday. I have the pens and the ink and the paper to write them in a language no one can read. For I have been dyed by a stone god, and burned in his fire, and no one will touch me, and no one will stand with me on the gravel to look out at the vast, grey ocean.