#i feel like Sisyphus rolling a bolder up a hill

[the-lizard-lord]

Me, writing chapter 15 of zombie: I have written up a pretty good build up to the fight with Kuro! Yay me!

Me, writing chapter 16 of zombie: fuck's sake, now I have to write the goddamn fight scene.

[shadowkat678]

I feel like Sisyphus rolling his bolder up the hill.

One moment my room is clean. Next day, trashed. Neverending cycle straight from the depths of hades.

[hms-chill]

Shall I Stay? Would it be a Sin?

Summary: Henry wakes up in Paris, in the middle of the first night he's spent with Alex, and realizes he should go.

Henry's not sure what wakes him up, but for a few glorious moments, everything feels perfect. The bed is soft and warm around him, and gentle music drifts up from a busker on the street below. It's warm for March, so they'd left a window open for some fresh air, and a soft breeze is playing with the gauzy curtains. And best of all, when he turns his head a bit, he can see Alex Claremont-Diaz's arm draped across him. Henry rolls over a bit, slowly, trying his hardest to preserve this moment for as long as he can. If he wakes Alex, or if he wakes himself up too much, the spell will be broken, but he can't help risking it. He wants to see Alex.

When he sees Alex's face, blissed out and relaxed in sleep, he feels something lodge itself in his throat. He knows, suddenly and with crystal clarity, that this is a terrible mistake. He can't have this; he knows that. Ever since they first met at the Olympics, he's known that even just a friendship with Alex would be a bad idea. Something like this, whatever they have now, has to be catastrophically worse. But still. It can't hurt too much, just this once. That's what he tells himself, at least, as he reaches out a hand to gently brush a hair out of Alex's face. Just this once, here, away from the reporters and the cameras and everything else, lying next to Alex can't be too bad. Even if it cuts him down to his very core to be this close to a life he can never have, well, at least he can feel the warmth before he melts the wax on his wings.

Henry doesn't often let himself think about the future. For as long as he's been able to think about it realistically, it's looked bleak, and he hasn't exactly wanted to dwell on a lifetime of loneliness. But looking at Alex now, face smushed against a pillow, he lets himself imagine a future like this. He knows it's impossible, and probably stupid to dream about, but it's the middle of the night, and they're in Paris, so he lets his mind wander. He dreams of nights spent like this, with Alex content and asleep beside him. He dreams of quiet moments when he can just look at Alex, with no reporters to take pictures or prying strangers to ask questions. He dreams of a life where he can just be with Alex, no armor or closet or anything else to hide them. In the wee hours of a Parisian morning, he lets himself dream about it, and he wants it so badly it hurts.

He knows he shouldn't think like this, knows he can't have any of it. Not with anyone, but certainly not with Alex. He shouldn't even be here now; every second he's in this hotel is a greater chance they'll be discovered. He's risking a scandal every moment he spends with Alex's arm around him, Alex's breath on his neck and Alex's legs tangled with his. He knows what he's risking, knows he should go, and yet. He looks at Alex, snoring lightly against the pillow, and he knows in a heartbeat that if his was the only fate at risk, he would stay here forever. He would be happily disowned and discredited, would dance as the tabloids dragged him through the muck if it meant one more breath like this.

But it's in that breath that he thinks about how many other lives he's risking. There's Bea; she'll defend him and get wrapped up in anything she isn't already dragged into. There are the lives of other queer folks, who will see everything that happens to him if he's discovered like this. And on Alex's side, there's his whole family, and Ellen Claremont's entire administration. If the first son of the United States is found in bed with the Prince of England, well. Henry doesn't want to imagine what it would do to the upcoming presidential race. He knows what the Republican Party is capable of, and he knows what they'll say if anyone finds him here with Alex. Henry was raised in this fishbowl of scrutiny; he knows how far people can twist things. With eight months to the election, this could be rewritten into whatever the Republicans need to push Ellen out of office.

It's that thought that motivates him to gently start to extract himself from Alex. He'd risk everything he has for another moment together, but this is too big. It's bigger than either of them, and maybe even bigger than the two of them put together. Still, for just a split second longer, he lets himself look at Alex. He lets himself study Alex's face, the way it relaxes in sleep, the little snores and littler smile on his lips. He's beautiful, and Henry feels that lump in his throat again. He should go, but he's never known what's good for him, always wanted just a bit more than he can have. So, slowly, trying to savor the moment as much as he can, he brushes Alex's hair aside and leans forward to kiss his forehead. One last kiss, one last moment to pretend he can have this, and then he's sliding out of bed, already looking for his pants when a hand closes around his wrist.

It's Alex's hand; he knows even before he looks at it. Still, he lets his eyes take their time traveling up the arm to find Alex's face. Alex is clearly barely awake, blinking up at him with a frown that wasn't there a moment before. He looks so confused, and so tired, that it nearly makes Henry get back into bed, risks be damned.

"Where're you going?"

"I... I thought I'd..." Every excuse dies on Henry's tongue as he looks at Alex, who makes a disapproving noise as he tugs Henry's hand closer and presses a kiss to each of his knuckles.

"Stay? You're warm, baby."

The lump in Henry's throat threatens to overwhelm him suddenly. He vaguely processes that his knees are going to give out, and the only place to sit is the bed, so he lets himself fall back into it, Sisyphus's bolder tumbling back down before he even got close to the top of the hill. Alex tugs him closer,  pulling him back under the blankets before nuzzling into his neck. As much as he knows he shouldn't, knows this isn't real, Henry holds him a little closer. He kisses the place where Alex's ear meets his face, earning an appreciative hum as Alex falls asleep again. He's tucked up against Henry now, too close for Henry to leave even if he could bring himself to try.

For now, all he can do is bury his face in Alex's hair and try not to cry. There's so much hair; he's pretty sure he swallows a few strands as he breathes it in. But burying them in Alex's hair is the only thing he can think to do with the emotions that threaten to overwhelm him.

It has been five years and eight months since anyone has called him 'baby'. He can't remember the last time he heard the word, though he must have heard it some time in that span, but the last time it was directed at him was just before his dad's funeral. He'd cried in the car on their way there, and his mum had taken his face in her hands and wiped his tears. She'd pulled him into a hug, and she'd called him her baby then, voice choked with tears of her own. Just like always, she'd promised him that she would be there and it would all be okay.

It wasn't. Nothing has been okay since, and his mum hasn't called him her baby, either. No one has called him 'baby' since. Bea doesn't use the term, Pez doesn't know it, and he'd made Shaan put it on a list of things that fake girlfriends weren't allowed to say to him. Alex doesn't know what it means, either; he can't. He can't know Henry's history with the word. As he lies there in the darkness, Henry tries his hardest to remind himself that from Alex's mouth, 'baby' is just another pet name. It isn't the unconditional promise of fierce love he'd grown up with.

But even from Alex, that 'baby' has to mean something. Tonight, it's a request, a vulnerability. It had asked Henry to stay, and to trust that Alex and their teams and whatever forces of the universe might be looking out for them will be enough to protect them. It asked Henry to trust whatever this thing between them is, and while it left him a choice, it's a choice between Dickens and Austen. He could leave this warm bed to traipse through Paris back to his own hotel, disheveled and miserable, or he could lean into a man who's let down his guard and trusted him to stay. As he lets himself sink back into the moment with Alex, letting himself put his fear off until the morning, he recognizes the busker's song just long enough to murmur the last lines into Alex's hair. It feels like a confession and a prayer and a declaration all rolled into one, like something monumentally bigger than the eight little words hummed into a sleeping boy's ear. He feels something inside him shift as he sings, and he knows that he's in too deep. He knows that when it gets to be too much and Alex leaves, when this all blows up in his face or comes crashing down around him, it will take a part of him with it. But he'll take whatever he can get, so for now, he leans in closer and lets himself believe he can have something like a relationship here. He sings gently, Alex's breath tickling his neck as the breeze carries the last few notes through the window, and his heart is so full he thinks it might explode.

"... I can't help falling in love with you."

On AO3

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[ruminativerabbi]

Rosh Hashanah 5781

King Sisyphus lives on in most people’s minds because of the punishment in Hell he was condemned endlessly to endure, but there’s also a back story worth considering. Sisyphus was king of Corinth (in his day called Ephyra), but he was not a very worthy regent. Stingy and dishonest, Homer features him incurring Zeus’s wrath particularly by inviting guests to his palace and then robbing and killing them. He also plotted to kill his own brother, which plot involved the seduction of his own niece. You get the picture. Not a nice guy! But the best part of the story, at least in my opinion, features Sisyphus in a hand-to-hand struggle with Death—personified in the myth as the god Thanatos—whom he actually vanquishes so completely that no one on earth can die for as long as Thanatos is under his control. For the Olympians, that is the last straw. And so we finally see Sisyphus sent by Zeus to Tartarus, the Greeks’ version of Hell, where he is condemned to spend all eternity rolling a huge bolder up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom just before he gets to the crest. Over and over. Forever. And not only never succeeding, but—in my opinion, far worse—knowing full well he won’t ever succeed. I’ll paste in a picture of Sisyphus and his rock from an ancient Greek urn to help you get the picture even more clearly.

And so King Sisyphus became famous as the patron saint of pointless endeavor, of interminable striving to achieve an unattainable goal, of unending, permanent frustration. I remember reading Albert Camus’ book, The Myth of Sisyphus, back in college—and finding the author’s suggestion that we are all Sisyphus as we spend the days of our lives trying, to speak in Camus’ own terms, trying to find a way around the absurdity that inheres in all human endeavor. I didn’t much like Camus’ book back then and I suspect I’d like it even less now. (I don’t think I’ve ever actually enjoyed anything of Camus’ that I’ve read, The Stranger and The Plague most definitely included.) But there is something about Sisyphus and his horrible fate that even to this day frames the way I think about the High Holidays and particularly Rosh Hashanah.

It would be easy to describe the work of the holiday season as essentially Sisyphean in nature. We live out our lives against the annual return of these penitential Days of Awe when we are bidden to seek God’s forgiveness for our moral missteps and ethical errors. We do our best, obviously. Yet we never get it quite right, never behave quite as we ourselves think decent and right. As a result, there’s something of Sisyphus’s fate in the way we approach the holiday season and its endless prayers for forgiveness from sin but without ever quite finding the inner strength to obviate the necessary to seek God’s mercy at all by comporting ourselves well in the first place. To speak in Sisyphean terms, we push and we push our personal boulders up to the top of our personal hills…but then Elul comes around the following year and we’re suddenly back at the bottom of the hill. With the boulder. I follow the logic in that line of thinking. But it’s never seemed that way to me.

Life is full of uncompleted and uncompletable tasks. We read the Torah in our synagogues according to an annual lectionary cycle that never ends: when we get to the end of Deuteronomy, we simple roll the scroll back to Genesis and start reading again. The liturgy we recite daily alters slightly as we make our way through the year, but not too dramatically or even all that noticeably; we say our prayers morning after morning and wrap up at the end of the book, but then we when we return to synagogue the morning after that and open the book to the same opening set of benedictions that opened the service the previous day. I remember someone once telling me that cleaning up the house before your kids move out is like shoveling the driveway while it’s still snowing: a pointless undertaking you’re going have to redo anyway and might as well not bother with until then anyway. But this isn’t like that at all, not really. Eventually, it does stop snowing. Eventually, your kids really do strike out on their own. But no matter how much energy you expend studying Torah, you don’t ever get to the end. You’re never done. You learn more and more, but all you really learn—presuming your own intellectual integrity—is how much more you have to learn and how very little you’ve actually accomplished. For some reason, though, that aspect of Torah study inspires me more than it depresses me. And so it is with these holidays now almost upon us. It would be simple to find it frustrating, bordering on pointless, to recite this year the same prayers for forgiveness and divine clemency we’ve recited for all the years of our lives, none of us having successfully obviated the need to bother with all that praying by actually living lives free of transgression, misstep, or sin.

I know how Sisyphus must have felt. And yet…I can’t quite bring myself to consider the High Holiday season as the Jewish version of Tartarus. Every time I open the Torah, even after all these years, I find new insights, new lessons I hadn’t noticed before, new puzzles I hadn’t noticed before and find myself eager to solve. Daily prayer makes me feel vigorous and refreshed, not bored or cynical. And coming to shul on Rosh Hashanah to begin the whole penitential season again does not make me feel failed or doomed, but alive with the possibility of growth, of insight, and of transformation. In other words, to describe our annual festivals as Sisyphean because we’re still pushing the same boulder up the same hill is to miss a crucial point here: that the specific experience of pushing our specific Jewish boulder up our specific Jewish hill is itself far more satisfying than frustrating. (To say the same thing in other words, these holidays are far more process- than goal-oriented.) For me personally, and I suspect for many others, the holiday season reminds us of our potential for growth, even late in life, as it invites us to contemplate the possibility of growing into a finer iteration of ourselves no matter how many holiday seasons we’ve all lived through.

No one would tell an athlete that it’s pointless to run around the same track day after day because the track will still be there the next day. Indeed, the point of exercise is not that the track be ran around or that the weights be lifted, but that the person running the laps or lifting the weights become stronger and healthier through the process. And that too is how I think of our holidays: as an opportunity to become morally and spiritually stronger through the set of ancient rituals about to be undertaken by Jewish people across the world, not as an endless series of tasks that never get done despite our best efforts.

So, the short answer is that, no, I don’t find our holiday labors Sisyphean, stultifying, or absurd. Just the opposite, actually: as a human being ever eager to grow intellectually, morally, spiritually, and ethically, I welcome the chance to push my boulder up to the top of the peak once again fully aware that the point is not that the boulder be moved through my efforts, but that I myself be moved…to a new place, to a new set of personal goals, to a new set of possibilities. Sisyphus lives on as the symbol of tedium; in my life, the High Holiday season lives on, year after year, as the embodiment of the possibility of growth. And I don’t find that tedious at all. Nor should anyone!