beautiful pawn // monologue

Abstract: This monologue is based on the story of Ariadne, from the myth of the Labyrinth. She gifts Theseus a ball of thread which allows him to navigate the Labyrinth and kill the minotaur, and then he takes her with her when he leaves Crete. He then leaves her behind on an island. I thought this was a particularly potent description of the reality for Greek women in myths. ARIADNE: The first time I saw him, I thought he was a god in disguise. A beautiful boy, muddied and eyes downcast, with an immutable aura of power. Disguised among the spoils of my mother’s lust and my father’s hunger for power — divinity finally coming to purify the corruption in Crete.

I should have known that the gods never care enough to protect the rabble who worship them. Men in fear will pray out of necessity, but those who are content will only ever pray out of obligation. It is a ceaseless fact of humanity that we will always believe we came across our good fortune out of our own skill and goodliness, and so we pray at an altar to our egos in the name of the gods. An unhappy man will throw himself, defenseless, at the feet of those same gods, because to him, it is impossible that he could have ever brought that misfortune down upon himself — it must be some fate greater than he.

The truth of him was worse than a god. I believed he was my fate, come to rescue me from my paper prison. He was simply a harbinger of the cruel twists the Fates decided were to be my providence. I could almost wish that I had forged my cruel fate at all, even a wicked one. That my twisted destiny was in some way deserved, and perhaps in a previous life, I was a cruel villain. Or that my complaints of a litany of paper cuts were the cries of a selfish girl, and my fate was to be a culmination of every