Cassandra

I'm the type of person to fall in love with things, even for a little while. Hobbies, fandoms, origami, how to draw mushroom people (you just do it), mythology, musings on the insanity of existence by Bukowski and Kafka and Watts and Camus and the like.

I guess my fixation these days is DnD. And for some reason, it seems those I listen to have a fixation with gods too. The way they think. The way they work. The reason for their existence. And what would happen if they lived and died.

I've begun one called Natural Six recently where most of the gods of the land are dead. The good ones, anyway. As for the vile ones and the wild ones, little to be known. The DM, storyteller, narrator describes things in painstaking detail. It is at once hard to and wonderful to listen to because I know it is a world I would not want to join but it is nice to leave this one, isn't it?

But the one I really want to talk about is the one I finished semi-recently. It's called Fantasy High and the mythos the DM has created around these characters is so wonderfully bizarre. Strange monarchs, gods, animals and humanoids. Even the frost genie who owns an ice cream shop has a story. And because he cares about the world and what the players want to do, the players care too.

They immerse. And so do I.

My wonder is on the way he's created gods for them. In the way I felt a calling to a god that hadn't existed when I first learnt of Cassandra, deity of doubt. A bizarre concept. To give such a thing a form and remind us it's okay to be confused. It's okay to be lost. That it is uneeringly, unapologetically human to be somewhere you aren't sure of.

We are born. Placed into families we clash with and vibe with at once. Given a race, a body, some genetic patterns of whatever kind, hair and chests and noses and brains. We have minds that form from everything we will ever hear and consider. We make decisions when we are children that affect us decades in the future. Everything affects everything. Everything touches everything. It's all connected and it all feels meaningless but being alive is a story that is only yours so that must mean something, musnt it?

I try to give meanings to things. Even when I don't, my brain does. That was a choice I made as a child that stuck. Perhaps taught to me by my mother. Perhaps just picked cos it made sense. I try to make sense of a world that will never bow for me. Will never shape itself to fit my desire for it. Never with people who are always gentle and kind and non-judgmental. No one telling me I will go to hell because I am gay or agnostic, no one telling me being fat will kill me or that my body cannot belong to me when it's meant to aesthetically please others.

In the end, these are my words, though. My thoughts. My madness. I've built a tapestry of lies about how the world sees me since I was a child. Block by block based on all I saw and heard on TV, from my mother who constantly belittles herself even now, my father who criticises every slight mistake even now. I chose to think the world was out to get me. I haven't let it go. The fear is still there. The shame I feel at being myself despite my longing for acceptance, the freedom I only find when I witness people laugh and bond on my screen.

So Cassandra brought a shift to me. A sort of... Knowing that I already knew before. A memory of two words I've held in my head somewhere since I was gifted them in a dream, once.

Let go.

She is a goddess whose body is made up of the night sky itself, its starry and utterly dark sides. The colours of space, its infinite nature... The world's infinite potential. That of people. Unpredictability isn't just a bad thing. There is good that can happen with surprises. Maybe I'll learn that too some day.

She reminds me of the goddess Hecate, of the crossroads. Women who teach me to find my way by allowing myself to have no way for once. To let go of what I am told by my father, my mother, my siblings, strangers, friends past and few present, this 'world' I've decided must weigh so heavily on me.

A world where every person that has ever and will ever exist has at least one characteristic that I do. A stranger that shares my smile. My lack of religion. My size. My confusion. My traumas here and there. My skin. My exhaustion. My terror. The one that lives beneath my skin and cries out when uncertainty gets much too overwhelming. But here I am still. And the thoughts of your thoughts, world, they haven't killed me yet.

I know it is not an unkind universe. Nor a kind one? I don't think it's meant to be one or the other. I seek a home between; a place where I can just see the world and my future as the world and my future, my cactus-tinted glasses thrown to the wind.

So yeah. Cassandra. I don't worship any gods but once in a while I find myself thinking of her and Hecate, of Ekwensu, Anansi and Loki. And I can't help but hope that if the gods are truly made real by their followers, according to the world the DM built, perhaps it's nice to think there's a goddess made of nebulas, black holes and starlight watching over me, certain that all this uncertainty and limitless potential is as tragic as it is beautiful, a strange sort of smile on their face.

The End ✌