Wait for me

I’ve been listening to the Hadestown Broadway Cast album on repeat a lot lately. Because of that, I’ve been thinking about the music and the myth.

In particular, I’ve been thinking about the song Wait for Me (Reprise), how the chorus entreats Orpheus to show the way the world could be, insisting that if you can do it so can she, if she can do it, so can we. It all ends in tragedy, of course. This isn’t a spoiler; the story’s as old as love. Orpheus turns at that last second and Eurydice falls wailing into the dark. I imagine the chorus follows too, billowing away into dust.

Wait for me.
I’m coming.

And I’ve been thinking of them since I saw the Broadway show last year, been thinking about every interpretation of the myth, been thinking about how, in the end, Hermes says that it’s a tragedy, that it’s a sad song but hey, we sing it again, anyway, hoping for a different ending. Every cup is raised for poor Orpheus, wherever the bastard is as they reset the stage, ready to try once more in case this time it’s different.

I struggle with depression. A lot of the people I’ve loved and love now struggle with the same. And if you’ve ever been depressed, you know it’s not always a choking despair but often a grayness, a sense of futility, of each day being as empty as the next. There’s no point. There’s no reason to hope. It’s so fucking insidious. Before you know it, you’ve lost sight of the sun in the sky and all you can hear is the black hound howling, this is hell and you’re here until you’re lucky enough to die.

The dog you really got to dread
Is the one that howls in your head.

That’s the worst part of it, I think, that saturating bleakness, like a rime of frost settled on every rib. It’s not enough for you to want to trouble anyone with it, especially not when the world is so full of bigger problems. Especially when you’ve had people tell you to just cheer up, to think positive, to do something about it. Especially when you’ve had people leave because they’re tired of you being in pain.

Wait for me.
I’m coming with you.

And it’s such a thing when you’re used to that abyss and someone comes striding down into the dark for you, a song beating in their throat. There’s no ‘saving’ people, of course. No real way to make the demons go away, or to make the black dog stop baying. What peace you can get, you must find on your own. The road up must be taken single file. But it is an easier climb when you know someone’s there, that someone’s coming to take your hand.

When someone’s lost like that, the best we can do really is be like Orpheus, to make a gift of ourselves to them, show what the world could be in spite of what it is, and go down into the dark with hope like a light, crying, wait for me. i’m coming. If they don’t take our hand, if they let go, if they flinch because we faltered, if the howling swallows any song of hope, we sing it again, going down into the dark over and over as many times as we have breaths left.

At least that’s what I believe. That’s what I’ve known.

The older I get, the more aware I become of how fundamentally pointless everything is, how little survives the centuries. I worry often that we’d be the last generation excavating the past for myths, searching for connection, asking if those who lived before us ever loved despite hopelessness. Some part of me expected to be rendered more jaded by those revelations, but instead they’ve opened a deeper welter of tenderness. Pointless as all of it is, meaningless as our lives might ultimately be, we still create art, we still fall in love, still tell stories to each other of how we’ll never be forgotten, still give each other rings and say forever, this is forever.

Maybe, that’s where eternity lives, where magic hangs like a strip of silk held up to the sun: in our willful defiance, in our prayer that we can do something to keep out the winter cold, in that naïve hope that we can be more than a flint-strike in the universe’s eye. That our love can be enough to save us, that it can be enough to show the way.

And maybe, it can.

Who knows? We still have time for another song.

You’re not alone.
I am right here behind you.

As always, of course, a cat picture.