How did you two meet?
A) We met on Hinge.
or
B) I am a prince and I am with my brother, in a wealthy foreign land, treating with a foreign king with a beautiful foreign wife. Soon our eyes meet, pupils locked, entangled. Then we run away and all the men who love her pursue, burning crop, waging war. Still, love is a sanctity that must be defended and so we battle for a decade. I also kill the demigod Achilles.
or
C) I am a prince, with my brother, with a wealthy foreign king, with a beautiful foreign wife... soon she has run away with me, with an empire in pursuit…
Word gets around how I stole his woman, smuggled her over borders, refused to let her go, and caused a war that wastes away ten years and maims basically everyone I know. People start to not really like me.
or maybe also more realistically
D) I smell smoke waiting for the train. It takes me off the faded polish of my regular commute and up the escalator. I find myself off the street, on the second floor of a burning building... and you, you there too; your blonde hair lapped at by the flame but never catching. Cool under the pressure of the thinning air, in the process of submerging yourself in a claw-foot tub of boiling water (the temperature of hell; the Underworld). I ask you politely if you’d like a hand. Your skin scalds my arms as I carry you, step by step, out of the burning building.
but meanwhile
E) All men hate me on both sides of the gate, in that I grow weak for the love of you, and that I have caused ten years of doom to everyone for my self indulgence. You yourself call me a coward, scorn the reckless impulse that inched each limb of yours away from salvation and towards me, god-blessed but damned regardless.
and then
F) I get thrashed around by your husband for a while before I am saved by the Goddess of love and lust and beauty and pleasure, Aphrodite, who has always had the hots for me.
really in reality
G) Trying to impress you I compared us to Paris and Helen; star crossed lovers who took war for love, although most of what I knew of the story was from the movie Troy with Brad Pitt.
Now that I’m a sophisticated writing student and much more better-read, I realise Paris is actually not a good person to be compared to.
so…
H) Maybe I am the warlike Achilles, you being Briseis, cooling my rage for only a moment. But again, that is more Troy than The Iliad. Also, either way, Achilles is not a great person to be compared to. Really, I’d want to be Hector, but then where are you?
not to mansplain but
I) Fiction is all lies–lies that try to translate the chaos of reality into something as two dimensional as a piece of paper. I had played God. But no, even gods (lower case G) have to contend with each other; I had played Homer, and now I cannot unassign roles I’d blindly given, as the intergenerational, international echoes of Chinese (ancient Greek) whispers go uncontrollably beyond our intentions.
also it turns out that
I) We are influencers, Inner-West micro-influencers, or maybe Kardashian level influencers, and every time we tell our stories people listen. Women and men fluster, film execs commission, politicians dance our rhythms. Buildings burn, Paris and Helen are sanctified, statues are erected. Women leave families, men send arrows into the ankles of their enemies. Inaccuracies create digestibility. Our minds yearn for the simple sting of unrequited love, why overcomplicate? All we can do is lie to each other, build structures that mimic order, storify truth until it makes sense.
so,
J) Appeal to desirability. Why don’t we make it a settler epic, I bet that’d sell: I am a leader of my ancestors, Windradyne, Wiradjuri warrior. I walk into Parramatta with PEACE written on my hat, an olive branch across my shoulders. Then the fictional pivot; I catch the eye of the wife of the governor, you, and you run away with me, and the war continues, and on and on.
fuck
K) We’ve gone too far in our web of lies, we’ve butchered too many stories. Book ink is bleeding, paper sticks together, histories are warring.
LMNOPQRSTUVWXY) We met, we told some lies, entertained each other. All you can do is let go of the beginning as it thrashes in your hand, there is no control of the story.
so back to basics:
Z) We talked a bit on Hinge. We got a drink. I chose the place because the courtyard got sun but by the time you arrived there was only a sliver left. We moved from place to place, ran into familiar faces, made up a few stories. We kissed and looked at the city. We walked for a while, took the bus, ate burgers. I stayed over but we didn’t make love. We shivered, both from the cold and the comfort of being close to each other. You fell asleep quickly but I was uncomfortable on your $90 mattress. The next day you made us toast and put heaps of sugar in the coffee and we laid in the sun and then you went to work.
but there still is fiction in every word, really it went like
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