classics student gothic
your life is a dizzying mashup of language and culture and memories of people you have never known in your life because, as far as you know, they died hundreds of years before your soul was a spark in the celestial fire. that is what you tell yourself, anyway. you are fairly certain that you are from this century, and you pay no heed to the replica busts of caesar and pompey and plato that whisper otherwise. plato has always been a terrible liar, after all.
somebody asks you if you know ancient greek. you can do little more than give them a blank stare. you know that you have taken classes and read great ancient works in their original tongue, but try as you might you cannot recall a single phrase of them. ‘nobody knows ancient greek,’ you say with a laugh, as if it’s a joke, but deep down you know the truth. nobody knows ancient greek. it refuses to be known.
fragments of vases and cups and statues with difficult names fill the cracks in your mind wherever they find the space to settle. you are a living catalog and you thrive on dates and locations of finds. sometimes you think you have seen this particular piece of kylix before, but you file it away regardless. you are sure it will come in handy someday.
you wake up one day to find a copy of homer on your bed next to you and assume you fell asleep reading. the next day there are two copies, and then three, and you brush it aside, again and again and again. there’s nothing wrong, you tell yourself. every classicist has twenty copies of homer, right?
you begin to speak of ancient figures as if they are your friends. at first this does not bother anyone, but soon they grow worried. ‘i don’t know what their problem is,’ you say to your good friend cicero. he does not respond. he is paper and ink and so many words spoken ages ago, but you swear you can feel a heartbeat.
your library is nothing but green and red, a shelter for ancient tongues to take refuge in. somebody asks you if you have any books other than loebs. you are confused. you are not sure any books other than loebs exist now, or ever did.
‘i wish we had more time to study for this exam,’ your classmate grumbles over their textbook. you hum in agreement but you don’t really feel the same way. time means little to you, you who study the past as if it’s the present. it is simply a name for that sea that separates you from them, wine-dark, eternal.
