Member-only story
Aphrodite of a Different Skin
She’s the air you breathe when night shrouds your room.
She looked like an Athena, but I knew her better as Aphrodite — though no one would have called her that just by looking at her. The goddess of love and beauty hid in plain sight, and it was a fallacy of man that he thought a pretty face was what such a goddess entailed.
No, there were deeper things: like kindness, like patience, like a good soul hidden in a shroud of pain and folly.
Eros did not know what to do with her. Neither did Hades. All the gods were at a loss when it came to a creature like her. They loved her in shades, so many to color a rainbow, but her greatest weakness lay in how she dealt out kindness to everyone — even the ones who deserved it least.
The abusers, the addicts, the alcoholics: she sought them with her eyes and tried to explain away their behaviors. But she had no idea what to do with them. Each one had their own pains, their own trials, their own deep-seated adversaries.
What she didn’t allow was the kindness she so desperately needed from herself. But she was learning. It was a high cost to pay, but it was necessary. No one could teach her except the monotony of a normal life lived out of the spotlight.
