I walked out of the heavy wooden doors of his estate and stepped onto the dirt path. For the first time in my life, the ground beneath my feet felt real. The air smelled of salt and wild herbs.
Stone does not change. Stone stays where you put it. Living things grow. Living things think. Living things want. Galatea - Madeline Miller.epub
He reached out to grab my wrist, his grip hard and unforgiving like the stone I used to be. "I made you!" he shouted, his face turning a deep, angry red. "You belong to me!" I walked out of the heavy wooden doors
"I am alive," I said. It was the first time I had ever spoken without being spoken to first. Stone does not change
Before I had lungs to breathe, I had the shape he gave me. He called it perfection. He told me that my cold, white marble hips were the standard by which all living women should be judged. He had prayed to the gods for a wife who would never talk back, never age, and never turn her eyes away from him.
The shift happened when my daughter, Paphos, was born. As I held her tiny, warm body against my chest, I looked at her soft skin. I realized that he would try to carve her, too. Not with a iron chisel, but with his voice, his rules, and his suffocating expectations. He would want her to be a silent statue, just like he wanted me to be.
I was no longer a masterpiece on a pedestal. I was a mother, a human, and finally, completely free.