Zara In Ink

unfiltered brain static. bruised language. haunted syntax. follow if you've ever said "this ruined me" & meant it as a compliment. ☕ support: https://ko-fi.com/zarainink

[zarainink]

IT’S HERE: Echoes of the Soul is officially out!

🚨 Emotional alert 🚨

After months of scribbled margins, poetic spirals, overcaffeinated edits, and staring at ancient ruins like they owed me answers — Echoes of the Soul: Dialogues with the Past is finally live on Amazon.

This is my first poetry collection. It’s about memory, ghosts, the weight of history and the tenderness of what survives. It’s for anyone who’s ever tried to talk back to the past and hoped it would listen.

It’s for:

The historian crying in the archives.

The poet who doesn’t know if the metaphor works but feels it in their ribcage.

The mythology nerd who thinks “what if Apollo had therapy?” is a valid literary theme.

You’ve seen some of these poems already — in fragments, in whispers — here on Tumblr and on Instagram. But now they’re all gathered in one place. Some that hurt. Some that heal. Some that do both.

🌿 Available as:

Formats: Available in paperback & ebook on Amazon 🌍 Available worldwide (US, UK, FR, DE, etc.) LINK TO BOOK : HERE

🌿 You can also find bonus poems, cut pieces, and commentary on my Ko-fi: [link]

Thank you for reading, for reblogging, for screaming with me. This is terrifying and exhilarating. I’m going to go lie down now.

[zarainink]

What Remains of Her Voice - Book 2

what remains of her voice is out now.

two women who should have been supervised. one talked too much. one ate the fruit.

a poetry collection in two movements: echo: who lost her voice, refused to behave quietly about it, and became something larger than silence.

persephone: who went into the dark, looked around, decided it had better lighting than expected, and stayed.

neither is asking for forgiveness. both are still speaking.

[zarainink]

What Remains of Her Voice

POV: greek mythology would’ve called you “dangerous” for having emotions and a functioning inner monologue.

So naturally I wrote a poetry collection about it.

What Remains of Her Voice — out May 21.

Two women who should have known better: • Echo, who lost her voice and became impossible to ignore. • Persephone, who went into the underworld and stayed longer than expected.

One talked too much. One ate the fruit.

They’d both absolutely do it again.

For readers of Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, and Pat Barker.

Come for the mythology. Stay because the women are making catastrophically relatable choices.

[zarainink]

OFFICE OF CELESTIAL WORKFORCE RELATIONS — COMPLAINT LOG

i wrote this at 11pm and i feel it is important that it exists

INTERNAL DOCUMENT — DIVINE GOVERNANCE UNIT Olympus HR Complaints Department: Quarterly Case Summary

Issuing body: The Office of Celestial Workforce Relations Cycle reference: Eternal Q3 (ongoing since approx. 700 BCE) Status of all prior complaints: Pending Status of this document: Also pending

Note: The Divine Governance Unit acknowledges receipt of all complaints. Receipt of a complaint does not constitute intent to act upon it. Nothing in this document should be interpreted as a promise of resolution, consequence, or change of any kind. The universe will continue.

CASE NO. OHR-001 Zeus Chief Executive Deity / Lord of the Sky / Head of Pantheon (self-appointed, repeatedly)

Reported issues:

Arrived to three consecutive All-Hands meetings as a different animal. Refused to explain why.

Issued seventeen contradictory decrees in the same afternoon, then blamed Hera for "the energy in the room."

Responded to a formal HR request for an accountability framework with a lightning bolt. The request is now ash. The irony is not lost on us.

When informed that his behaviour constituted a pattern, stated: "I am the pattern." Meeting was adjourned.

HR note: HR has attempted to open a dialogue with Zeus on eleven separate occasions. Seven of these attempts resulted in weather events. Two resulted in new demigods. One resulted in a memo that was very well-written but completely contradicted itself by paragraph three. HR would like to note, for the record, that we are doing our best.

Staff described the experience of reporting Zeus as "technically voluntary in the same way that breathing near him is technically voluntary."

CASE NO. OHR-002 Apollo God of the Sun / Prophecy / Music / Medicine / Archery / Several Other Things He Brings Up Unprompted

Reported issues:

Delivers all feedback in verse, including performance reviews. Has not stopped despite repeated requests.

Issued prophecy to three separate employees predicting their professional downfalls. When asked to clarify, issued another prophecy. This one rhymed.

Insisted on playing the lyre during a budget meeting "for focus." The meeting lasted four hours. Nobody knows what was decided.

When confronted about an interpersonal conflict with a colleague, said "I see all things" and walked away. The conflict remains unresolved.

HR note: Apollo is, objectively speaking, excellent at his job. This makes him significantly harder to manage. He is correct approximately 100% of the time, which he is aware of, and which he communicates through demeanour rather than words, which is somehow worse.

Colleagues report that requesting clarification from Apollo "feels like failing a test you didn't know you were taking, in a language you almost speak."

CASE NO. OHR-003 Hermes God of Communication / Logistics / Commerce / Thieves / Also Thieves

Reported issues:

Delivered fourteen messages to the wrong recipients. When questioned, noted that the messages "found where they needed to go," which is not how routing works.

Was caught reading sealed divine correspondence. Described this as "quality assurance."

Disappeared for nine days mid-project. Returned with winged sandals and no explanation. Project is now somehow complete. Nobody knows how.

Listed under three different departments simultaneously. None of them claim him.

HR note: HR cannot locate Hermes for long enough to formally reprimand him. By the time paperwork is prepared, he has already read it, responded to it, and left. We have begun addressing memos to "Hermes, wherever you currently are," which has a 40% response rate, which is, tragically, the highest in the department.

Attempting to schedule a meeting with Hermes was described by one complainant as "chasing a rumour that is also chasing you."

CASE NO. OHR-004 Athena Goddess of Wisdom / Warfare Strategy / Crafts / General Competence (unsolicited)

Reported issues:

Corrected HR's own complaint form. The corrections were accurate. This has not made things easier.

Restructured a colleague's entire project without being asked, then provided a seventeen-page rationale. The project was improved. The colleague has not recovered.

Maintains eye contact during conversations at a duration HR can only describe as "load-bearing."

When asked how she would rate her own performance, submitted a thirty-page assessment that concluded: "Satisfactory, with room for everyone else to improve."

HR note: Athena has not technically done anything wrong. She has, however, made everyone around her acutely aware of everything they have done wrong, which HR must acknowledge produces a similar effect. We asked if she had any feedback for us. She handed us a bound document. We have not yet finished reading it. We are afraid to.

Staff describe working near Athena as "being haunted by your own potential."

CASE NO. OHR-005 Aphrodite Goddess of Love / Beauty / Interpersonal Escalation / Situations That Began Quite Small

Reported issues:

A routine dispute over desk allocation has, at time of writing, caused two wars, one elopement, and a shipping disruption affecting the eastern Mediterranean.

Described a professional disagreement with Ares as "the most passionate thing that's happened to me this quarter." HR is not sure how to log this.

When asked to de-escalate a conflict between two departments, de-escalated it into a different conflict, which is technically progress.

Attended sensitivity training. Left early. Eleven people followed her out. The trainer also left.

HR note: We are not able to confirm that Aphrodite causes the incidents attributed to her. We are also not able to confirm that she doesn't. What we can confirm is that every complaint in her file was submitted by someone who, by the time we followed up, had withdrawn the complaint, started a rival complaint on her behalf, and sent flowers to her office. HR has stopped sending follow-ups.

One complainant described the process of filing against Aphrodite as "the most emotionally significant administrative experience of my immortal life."

CASE NO. OHR-006 Hades God of the Underworld / Sovereign of the Dead / HR's Most Compliant Employee (this is the problem)

Reported issues:

Has filed, processed, and resolved his own HR complaints without involving HR. We are not sure this is allowed. He cited a clause. The clause exists.

Responds to all emails within four minutes, at any hour. This has been flagged as unsettling.

Maintains a perfect record of every soul, case, and administrative outcome since the beginning of recorded time. Offered to share it with HR. HR declined. We are not sure why. We just felt we should.

When asked if he had any concerns about the workplace, said "No," and smiled. The smile lasted slightly longer than was comfortable.

HR note: Hades has done nothing wrong. This is, somehow, the most concerning file in the department. An entity with domain over the permanent and inexorable who has no complaints, no grievances, and a spotless record is not a reassuring thing to contemplate for too long. HR has stopped contemplating it.

Attempting to audit Hades was described by the auditor as "being very politely shown something you could not look away from, then escorted out by someone who was still smiling."

— INTERNAL MEMO: ESCALATION NOTICE —

The Office of Celestial Workforce Relations wishes to advise all complainants that the volume of submissions received in the current cycle has exceeded the department's processing capacity by a ratio of approximately all of them to our capacity, which has not changed since the department's founding and will not change.

It has been suggested — by an anonymous submission we are reasonably confident was from Hermes — that the complaints are not accumulating but are, in fact, being integrated. That the friction, the disruption, the chronic unavailability of accountability: that these are not failures of the system, but features of it. That the system works precisely as designed, and that the design is not ours.

HR would like to state, clearly and for the record, that we do not endorse this interpretation. HR would also like to note that we have been unable to stop thinking about it.

CLOSING STATEMENT — DIVINE GOVERNANCE UNIT — ETERNAL Q3

All complaints received by the Office of Celestial Workforce Relations have been logged, catalogued, and assigned case numbers consistent with our standard nomenclature. Complainants should expect to receive a response in the next review cycle.

The date of the next review cycle is not available at this time.

Outcomes from previous review cycles are not available at this time.

All matters remain under review. All matters will continue to remain under review. The Pantheon thanks you for your patience, which is noted, and your continued service, which is required, and your faith in this process, which is mandatory.

Nothing in this document constitutes a finding. Nothing in this document constitutes a promise. Nothing in this document will be followed up on. Everything in this document is accounted for.

Please do not reply to this memo. There is no one to reply to.

The Divine Governance Unit has been managing the immortal workforce since approximately forever. Our resolution rate remains consistent with the nature of the cosmos, which is to say: the complaints become history, and history is not a resolution, it is just what happened.

HR would like to note that unlike the complaints department, the ko-fi link is fully functional and you may fuel my coffee addiction here: KoFi

[zarainink]

The Language of Silence

🚨 Disclaimer: I should probably be editing my new book (hihi, surprise), but instead I wrote an essay about silence.

That half-second after “Are you okay?” when you say “Fine” and both of you know everything. The silences that comfort, the silences that warn, the silences that are quietly acts of love.

It’s about the language we never speak, how bodies say what mouths won’t, and why sometimes the quiet is the conversation.

Read it here: Ko-fi → [Link] Substack → [Link]

[koifee]

Would anyone be interested in a Witcher AU in these trying times?

[zarainink]

The thing nobody tells you about finishing something

I don't have a writing routine. No dedicated desk, no sacred morning hour, no Hemingway-esque ritual. I write when something pulls at me hard enough that ignoring it feels worse than sitting down. And I almost always have coffee. That part is non-negotiable.

What this means, practically, is that my process looks less like a system and more like a weather pattern. Calm for days. Then suddenly, something — a sentence, an idea, a feeling I don't have words for yet but know I need to find. I chase it.

Near the end, I hit the wall.

You probably know the wall. It's not writer's block exactly — that's a different beast. This is something that only shows up when you're close. When the thing is mostly done and you just need to land it. Suddenly it all looks wrong — flat, embarrassing, like something you'd cringe at in someone else's drafts folder.

Most people think that feeling means the work is broken. It doesn't. It means you're almost there.

Here's what I think is actually happening. For days or weeks, your piece has existed in the comfortable space of potential. Unfinished things can still be anything — still be great, still be exactly what you imagined. The moment you finish, that possibility collapses into one fixed, judgeable thing. And your brain, bless it, would really rather you didn't do that.

So it invents problems. It finds every seam and loose thread. It says this whole thing needs rethinking right when what you actually need is to write one more paragraph and let it go. It is, with love, completely wrong.

When I get stuck I don't push through. Pushing through has never once worked for me. I stop. I make more coffee, or I go do something entirely unrelated, for however long it takes — an hour, three days, once an entire season. I wait for the muse to stop sulking and come back.

But here's the thing I had to learn the hard way: there's a difference between being genuinely stuck and performing stuck to avoid finishing. One requires rest. The other requires you to notice what's happening and sit down anyway.

I abandoned something once — spent weeks on it, got two days from the finish line, and decided it needed a total rethink. I never came back to it. Looking at it now, it was fine. More than fine. I just didn't want to be done, because done meant it was real, and real meant it could be judged.

The muse didn't fail me that time. I failed the muse.

What changed for me was learning to recognize the spiral as a landmark rather than a warning sign. Now, when I hit that wall — when something I loved yesterday suddenly looks like a disaster — I know what it means. I'm close. The doubt is the signal. The frustration is the last bend before the finish line.

And when I finally push through and finish something? Honestly, it feels a little like schadenfreude. A quiet, slightly unhinged haa. I have defeated you. That feeling is worth every abandoned coffee cup.

Finish the thing. The world has enough beautiful, perfect, forever-unfinished drafts sitting in notes apps.

Yours deserves to exist.

if this resonated, you can find more over on my Ko-fi ↗

[natesullycomics]

[waxedthoughts]

Even when it’s all over, I still look at you

[zarainink]

Bridgerton – Season 4, Part 2

Bridgerton Part 2 arrived like a silk-gloved hand to the throat and said

“what if we gave you a wedding… and then emotionally waterboarded you with grief?”

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨ Yes, yes. Benedict and Sophie get their glittering fairytale crescendo. The Queen’s Ball. The longing looks. The sweeping violins. The ring. The whole confection.

Benedict and Sophie get the fireworks in Part 2, the Queen’s Ball in full glittering delirium, the slow-burn romance snapping into place like a violin string pulled just to the edge of breaking. Critics are swooning. The chemistry is chemistr-ing. The fairytale lands exactly where it’s supposed to. Fine. Gorgeous. Applause.

But under all that satin and orchestral swelling, there’s a different temperature running through the season. Francesca’s grief isn’t staged like spectacle. It’s pressure. The show doesn’t shove it at you; it just sits in the room like unspoken bad news. And Hannah Dodd plays it with that lethal, porcelain composure where you can see the crack before you hear it. She’s not hijacking the narrative. She’s absorbing it. And I swear the camera knows it. Even in scenes that aren’t hers, it lingers like it’s testing the weight she could carry next. The way she tilts her head just slightly. The brush of a hand across her cheek. The score drops and she doesn’t move and you want to SCREAM. Tumblr is already side-eyeing this. You don’t frame a woman like that unless you’re planning to hand her the hurricane later.

She’s not taking over the ballroom. This half of the season still belongs to Benophie, all sparkle, swoon, and gowns moving slower than my heart during a cliffhanger scene. But the undercurrent is there. The potential. The seed of a story ready to bloom. You can feel it humming in the margins, quiet but insistent, like the first note of a storm you can’t yet see. If next season steps fully into that storm, Hannah Dodd is going to own it.

Benedict and Sophie got the fireworks.

Francesca got the foreshadowing.

And I am already emotionally budgeting for the possibility that next season belongs to her.

💐 Verdict: 9/10 emotionally destabilizing string quartets

🖤 Watch it if: you like your romance sweeping but your character arcs strategic

🕯 Watch it if: you believe the quietest characters are the ones with the loudest futures

I will be seated. With tea. And theories.

fuel my coffee addiction here: COFFEEEEE

[zarainink]

Wuthering Heights (2026): Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, and the Gothic Drama That’s Visually Stunning but Emotionally Hollow

It showed up on screens like somebody said, “Let’s take one of the most notorious gothic tragedies ever written and make something that looks like emotional ruin.”

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

Margot Robbie is there, yes, glowing, sculpted, commanding. Jacob Elordi is brooding, tall, everything a Heathcliff should look like. The moors are stormy. The wind is dramatic. The lighting wants you to feel something primal. And yet, I sit there blinking and thinking: Wait. This is supposed to hurt? Because it doesn’t. Not really.

I’ve seen a film leave me raw, unsettled, maybe even a little ashamed for being compelled. I’ve seen one make me ache because every glance, every scuffed shoe, every whispered insult carries social violence, class cruelty, obsession, rage. That is Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Wuthering Heights. Mud on faces. Wind biting your lungs. Handheld cameras that make you exist inside the story. Heathcliff’s outsider rage isn’t a pose, it’s a condition. Catherine’s selfish cruelty makes you flinch. That’s how the novel works. That’s how it ruins you.

Fennell’s version? It’s an Instagram filter on top of catastrophe. The aesthetic devours everything. The tragedy is curated. The obsession is styled. The social pressure, Heathcliff as outsider, Catherine as trapped daughter, the rigid class hierarchy, it’s flattened. What should make your stomach twist, what should make you sit forward and gasp, is replaced by perfectly framed sighs and slow-motion exchanges. It’s like watching someone perform emotional ruin while secretly wearing armor against it.

And I just keep thinking about all the moments that should have burned me alive, Catherine staring at the moors, Heathcliff’s return, whispered threats, subtle humiliations, class cruelty thick in the air, and instead it’s all glow, all slow-motion, all sighs. The wind is dramatic, the waves crash, the lighting is sultry, and I’m sitting there like, yes, visually this is gothic, but emotionally? Did the story leave its apartment today? Every look that should pierce your chest feels choreographed, every pause that should choke you with inevitability feels calculated. It’s like someone took the fever of Brontë’s obsession, bottled it, and then applied a soft-focus filter. I want the story to chew me alive, and it pats me on the head instead. I want the obsession to make my stomach twist, and I get a perfectly framed cinematic sigh. It’s so close to being magnificent and so far from being alive.

I know Fennell can go dark. I loved Saltburn. The obsession, the excess, the moral rot, she made it tangible, uncomfortable, feral. This, though, this is controlled. It’s cinematic poison diluted into a fashion campaign for gothic romance. The story should claw at you, and instead it gestures. The fever of Brontë’s novel replaced by curated brooding. The bite is absent.

It’s not bad. It’s not incompetent. It’s just hollow. Beautifully hollow. Fashionable, expensive, empty. A story about obsession and ruin rendered safe, like someone put it in a glossy box and added a moody soundtrack.

💀 Verdict: 5.5/10. Gorgeous frames, sighing stars, brooding looks, perfectly coiffed misery. Beautiful, expensive, emotionally buffered.

🖤 Watch it if you want cinematic Gothic aesthetics, romantic tension that doesn’t actually hurt, or a visually stunning Sunday scroll.

🚬 Don’t watch it if you’re looking for Brontë’s fever, obsession, corrosion, and chaos.

GO SEE IT. Just don’t expect to leave with your chest tight or your mind unsettled. This Wuthering Heights wants to look like catastrophe without ever being catastrophic.

If you want to fund my therapy for surviving this “gothic Instagram filter,” click COFFEE!!!!

[zarainink]

🐎✨ Happy Lunar New Year, friends! ✨🐎

It’s the Year of the Horse, which means it’s time to gallop into new adventures… or at least trot awkwardly while pretending you know what you’re doing. Speaking of adventures, my book Echoes of the Soul: Dialogues with the Past is live and ready to charge straight into your reading list.

Why read it this year? Because unlike an actual horse, it won’t eat your oats..... it will eat your existential dread, turn it into poetry, and maybe leave a little spark of chaos behind. Bonus: it pairs well with tea, coffee, or dramatic staring out of windows.

Saddle up, grab a copy, and let’s make 2026 a wild, poetic ride. 🐎💥

Link to book here: Booooook

[zarainink]

You ever meet a historical figure who makes you sit there for a second like. Oh. Oh you were built different. That’s Émilienne Moreau-Évrard.

Northern France. Coal country. 1915. She is seventeen years old. Seventeen. The age when most of us are catastrophically dramatic about exams or crushes or the existential horror of group projects. Her town is under German occupation. When the Battle of Loos erupts, she passes intelligence to British troops, guides them through back streets she knows by heart, helps establish a first aid post under active fire, and at one point, when German soldiers begin shooting wounded men, she picks up a revolver and fires back.

They call her the Heroine of Loos. And already that would be enough for a lifetime. Most people would have built a legacy around that, written memoirs, given speeches, been carefully applauded at commemorations. History, however, is not sentimental.

Second World War. Another occupation. Another authoritarian regime. The same quiet question posed to ordinary people: will you look away, or will you act? She joins the Resistance, works within the Brutus network, is arrested in 1944, escapes during the bombing of the prison at Rennes, and returns to clandestine work anyway. Two world wars. Same woman.

After the Liberation, Charles de Gaulle names her Compagnon de la Libération, one of France’s highest distinctions. Medals are fine. But they are not the point. The point is this uncomfortable truth history keeps repeating whether we want to hear it or not: democracy is not self-sustaining. Justice is not automatic. Freedom does not endure because it is morally correct. It endures because ordinary people — tired people, frightened people, people with ordinary lives — decide there is a line and refuse to let it be crossed without resistance.

Émilienne Moreau was not born brave. She just refused to normalize brutality. Twice in her life, the world broke the same way. Twice, she refused to bend with it.

If you wanna fuel my coffee addiction while I keep digging up stories like this, you can drop a tip on Ko-Fi.

[zarainink]

I finally watched The Apothecary Diaries and oh my god I loooove Loulan / Shisui.

At first, she’s easy to miss. Shisui: the servant girl with messy hair and curious eyes, collecting insects, laughing softly with Maomao. Her fingers linger on teacups as if memorizing their shape. She feels harmless. Gentle. You think you understand her.

Then she moves, and the air shifts.

Loulan is here. She was always here. Suddenly the palace feels smaller, tighter, like it was never meant to hold her.

Walking beside her through the corridors feels like watching something dangerous unfold quietly. The soft tap of her shoes on stone. Doors that open without a sound because she knows how to touch them. Silk whispering against walls no one else dares to brush. She notices everything: a fold in a sleeve, the wrong incense burning, the slight tremor in someone’s hand. Glances from courtiers and maids don’t slide past her—they land, and she measures them.

She is the opposite of Maomao in a way that aches. Maomao is brilliant but contained, working within the palace’s rules, bending them only as much as she must. Loulan reads the rules and smiles to herself. She decides which ones matter, which ones are tools, which ones are disposable. The palace rearranges itself around her presence, even when no one realizes she’s the reason.

Her role in the Shi Clan rebellion arc is devastating precisely because it’s so controlled. She steps into danger without ceremony. She protects Maomao and others in ways that look cruel until you understand the cost of truth. The “poisoned” children. The misdirected letters. The guards nudged just slightly out of place. Every move is calculated to save lives while keeping her hands clean enough that no one thinks to look at them. She walks through it calm and focused, carrying both mercy and violence in the same breath.

What makes her feel real is the duality. Shisui is playful, curious, untethered—someone who laughs easily, who touches the world lightly. Loulan is precise, imposing, brilliant, impossible to corner. She is not one or the other. She is both, and you never know which version will step forward until it’s already too late.

And then there’s the way she moves through womanhood in that world. The palace is a cage disguised as refinement: every word measured, every alliance watched, every body expected to serve power quietly. Loulan doesn’t reject that reality—she uses it. She listens where others dismiss. She watches where others posture. She takes risks men never have to consider and makes them look effortless. Her morality is shaped by survival and responsibility, not obedience. She doesn’t pretend to be simple. She doesn’t dull herself to be safe.

Loulan refuses the narrow roles written for women in stories like this. She is not just the obedient daughter, or the clever servant, or the scheming villain, or the selfless heroine. She is playful and ruthless, compassionate and merciless, chaotic and exacting. She is allowed to be contradictory without being punished for it. Watching her feels like remembering what complexity looks like when it’s fully alive.

She is not a hero. She is not a villain. She is not simple.

She is alive—feral, brilliant, layered, historically impossible in the best way. She makes you want to slow down and watch every glance, every pause, every choice. She leaves a pulse in your chest long after the screen goes dark and reminds you that female characters can, and should, be everything at once.

m’kay. donate link here if you want to fuel my coffee addiction ☕ if not, no worries — thanks for hanging out in my brain.

[zarainink]

Helen Was Never the Cause

Helen of Troy does not need to start a war to be blamed for one. She only needs to exist inside it.

She enters history already overdetermined: the most beautiful woman on earth, the face that launched a thousand ships, the woman whose body becomes shorthand for a decade of slaughter. These phrases trail after her like a verdict, flattening complexity into inevitability. They do not explain what happened at Troy. They explain how badly people wanted Helen to be the reason.

It is easier to name a woman than to name ambition. Easier to call it honour than to admit bloodlust. Easier to speak Helen’s name than to admit the war was unnecessary.

Helen was not the cause. She was the excuse.

She is never allowed to exist neutrally. Helen is always something to be managed: a witch, a victim, a seductress, a warning. Her character changes depending on who is telling the story, but her function does not. She absorbs responsibility so others do not have to. Desire fixes on her body, and fear follows close behind, as if wanting her were itself a crime that must be punished. Helen is not condemned for what she does so much as for what she makes men feel.

In Greek tragedy, Helen understands this dynamic, and she refuses guilt. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, she speaks first, before anyone else can frame her. She does not beg or weep or perform shame. Instead, she argues. She distributes blame strategically — to Paris, to the gods, to fate and circumstance — and positions herself as acted upon rather than acting. She expresses no visible remorse for Troy, and that composure alone marks her as dangerous. Helen does not behave like someone who believes she deserves death, and the audience is invited to distrust her for it. Her rhetoric is polished, almost sophistic. Although Hecuba can counter every excuse she offers, it is Helen’s voice that prevails. She survives because she understands the rules of the room. She survives because she speaks too well.

Seneca’s Trojan Women gives Helen a different strategy, but the same instinct for survival. Here, she does not so much argue as redirect. Ordered to persuade the Trojan women to surrender Polyxena for sacrifice, Helen foregrounds her own captivity, her unwillingness, her grief. She lies, then claims coercion. She insists that her suffering belongs in the same register as that of Hecuba and Andromache: they mourn husbands and sons; she mourns Paris. Their grief is visible and communal; hers, she claims, must be endured in silence. The comparison is grotesque, and deliberately so. Helen reframes the room until Polyxena’s impending death almost disappears. Suffering becomes a competition, and Helen refuses to lose. She survives not by denying harm, but by centring herself within it.

Michael Cacoyannis’ film adaptation of The Trojan Women understands Helen’s power without needing to explain it. When she appears, she is veiled, watched, contained. Later she is confined behind wooden boards, only her eyes visible, as if the film itself is trying to limit her reach. Then comes the water scene. The Trojan women beg for a drink and are refused. Helen asks, and receives it. She does not drink. She washes. The gesture is quiet, intimate, and obscene in its confidence. This moment is not in Euripides, but it makes visible what the play implies: even in defeat, Helen commands resources. Power adheres to her body whether she seeks it or not. When Menelaus comes to kill her, she does not flee. She circles him, exposing her back, her neck, her vulnerability — and her control. She performs despair. She performs remorse. She survives. She leaves Troy upright and dressed in white, while the other women remain ash-covered and broken. The final image of Helen is not punishment, but departure: Helen on the ship back to Sparta.

Modern cinema, by contrast, is often afraid of her. Troy (2004) removes the gods and reframes Helen’s departure from Sparta as choice, a gesture meant to read as empowerment. What it actually does is drain her of danger. Without divine obsession or inevitability, her beauty becomes ordinary and her presence loses weight. She is dressed exquisitely but filmed cautiously, treated as decoration rather than disruption. No one fears her. No one burns for her. A Helen who is not dangerous is not Helen at all. Reduced to apology and softness, she becomes manageable — a woman men can desire without consequence.

Margaret Atwood’s Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing restores what history so often denies her: narrative control. This Helen knows she is watched, desired, and judged, especially by other women, and she refuses shame. She names the gaze directed at her body and treats it with contempt. She takes the money. Men blur together, stripped of individuality or grandeur, their desire reduced to something grasping and ridiculous. When she is dismissed, Helen reminds us that divinity does not require belief. Touch her, and you will burn.

Helen’s beauty and supposed infidelity have been used for centuries to explain a war between Europe and Asia — a conflict with political, economic, and imperial causes compressed into the body of one woman. Again and again, Helen is made the lesson, the warning, the justification. Sometimes she is passive. Sometimes eroticised. Sometimes demonised. Sometimes “empowered” into irrelevance. But she is always made responsible.

Civilisations fall. Wars end. Stories rearrange themselves.

Helen remains.

She was never the cause. She was the excuse.

If you want to fuel my coffee addiction so I can keep screaming into the void, here’s my Ko-fi: [link]

[zarainink]

Fragments of you

I keep finding you where language breaks.

In the margin where the ink ran out. In the sentence that stops mid-breath because the truth outweighed grammar.

You are not gone. You are distributed.

A wrist in the echo of a doorway. A voice misremembered by rain. A name I never say without breaking my teeth.

Some days you arrive as archaeology— a shard of glaze, blue as a sea that never promised mercy, enough to prove there was once a vessel and that it mattered what it held.

Other days you are pure syntax: a comma I pause too long on, a tense that refuses to resolve, a future conditional that knows better than hope.

I try to assemble you, of course. Lay the pieces out on the table like evidence. This laugh goes here. This cruelty—no, here. This tenderness I keep wanting to excuse because it once learned my pulse.

But fragments do not want wholeness. They want witness.

They want me to say: this broke, and the breaking was not meaningless.

I carry you the way historians carry ruins— not to rebuild the city, but to trace the outline of what collapsed and call it real.

Sometimes I press the sharpest piece to my mouth just to remember the taste of you: iron, salt, the faint sweetness of what almost stayed.

I am learning not to hoard the pieces. To let some remain embedded where they landed— in music, in old arguments, in the muscle memory of reaching for someone who is no longer there to answer.

You are fragments of me now, too. Untranslatable.

Not a ghost. Not a lesson.

A map of breaks that still, somehow, knows my name.

[literaryvein]

L. V., excerpts from the afterword