EVE AND PSYCHE

You want me to be your Eve, whom you will wear like a wedding ring on your hand. You want me to give up my name and take yours. Not only that—you want me to preserve the honour of your name and continue your family line. You want me to leave my birthplace and come to live in yours because you believe that is what is best for me.

You want me to be your Eve, caring for your home, bearing your children and raising them. You want to place me in portraits that you will proudly show to everyone.

You want me to hide my beauty, to become a shadow of myself so that I do not invite temptation and sin. At the same time, you admire other women, turning them into objects of temptation.

You want me to become your shadow, keeping the fire burning in your home and protecting your name from gossip. Meanwhile, you are busy hunting free hearts to whom you cannot promise anything. Because I can no longer tempt you. Because they cannot become your slaves. You are a hunter. And this is the justification you have invented for yourself.

You do not want me to be whole and independent—a free woman whom you can love. No, you want me to be your other half, the one you can blame for the lack of harmony within yourself.

You want everything from me. You have too many chains prepared for me. Chains that would take away my freedom and turn me into your slave.

If I cannot accomplish all these earthly feats, you will not hesitate to cast me aside. You will let me leave alone, with my honour stained, rejected and humiliated. If your family line is not continued, you will blame me. You will accuse me of not being able to bear your children without ever searching for the reason within yourself, telling me that an infertile woman has no place in your home.

And yet I am your Eve. I cook your food. I warm your bed. And all of this bears the name of love.

Who are you? A God?

To marry me, I must be a saint. To love me, you want me to be a sinner. I must somehow combine these two contradictory roles perfectly. You do not think this is cruel to my soul because you think I do not deserve to have a soul. You believe you deserve the very best, while I was born to serve you faithfully. Perhaps, one day, faithful service will earn me a reward—if your capricious mood decides that I deserve it. You only take from me. You take the warmth of my heart to warm your cold, selfish one. Without hesitation and without guilt, you take the beauty and strength of my mind to inspire your own life. But you make no commitment to me. You are like a thief of emotions. You take from me with both hands. And when a new, gentle inspiration appears, you leave me without a second thought, following your instincts. You leave me shattered into pieces, without caring what becomes of me. You can be very cruel. You are convinced that I have no soul because, in your eyes, I do not need one.

One woman is never enough for you. You are a hunter. Your heart is a hunter, and so is your body. You change the laws and the rules so that you can legally possess several women. But is there room for so many women in your home? And in your heart? Or does it remain cold despite the abundance of female bodies simply because it has never learned to love truly? It has never learned to sacrifice, only to hunt.

For a very long time, you did not allow me to inherit your home or your property. Your sons enjoyed greater rights and greater influence in society than I did. Even today, in some places, your daughters cannot become your lawful heirs simply because they were born in female bodies and you decided that they were worth less than you. You can be deeply unjust.

For a long time, my public presence disturbed you, and my social engagement frightened you. In your opinion, my place was in the kitchen or in your bed, like your favourite servant. I had no right to fight for social justice because that might have led me to fight for myself. And you were afraid of losing your power.

You wanted me, like Eve, to sin with you and then bear the blame for your sin. For centuries you accused me of humanity's fall. You believed that my curiosity and my supposedly deceitful nature were the reasons why God cast us out of Paradise. You pointed at me as the sinner responsible for every sin on earth. To you, I became the embodiment of evil and temptation, and you would not allow me to preach the Word of God because you considered me unworthy of such a sacred role. You tortured yourself in order to drive your desire for me out of your heart.

For centuries you accused me of being a witch and ordered me to be burned at the stake. Every woman had to obey if she wished to stay alive.

For a very long time, you would not allow me to fall in love with you first. And if it happened, you would not allow me to confess my love before you confessed yours. Cowardly, you called my love impure and me perverted. You urged others to stone me because I dared to be the first to admit that I loved you. You were prepared to condemn your own heart to torment rather than surrender my right to be first—or simply better than you.

And if fate, in its cruel irony, causes you to fall in love with a woman from another ethnicity, you do everything you can to destroy that love. You make every effort to ensure that no one from your tribe discovers it because they would not approve. They would condemn both you and your love. And although you are a hunter, you are not brave enough. You need the approval of your own people. So you avoid me, treating me as a shameful and forbidden experience. You carefully cut away the place inside yourself that remembers me. But why, even then, does the memory of me continue to bleed and ache? This is my curse upon you—to remember me and to suffer for me while you are with other women, smaller women, easier women.

You insisted on having both the first and the last word in everything. You changed the laws to serve yourself. I had no voice in anything. I was expected to remain your beautiful but obedient shadow.

There were years when your cruel and unjust treatment transformed me. Your hypocrisy and cowardice opened my eyes. I looked around and realised that what you called your shadow was, in truth, something far greater. Within my beautiful and seductive body lives a whole world that you never wished to touch. It is my secret world, into which you are not allowed because, according to your beliefs, it does not even exist. Winter after winter. Spring after spring. I became bolder and freer. And you grew increasingly afraid of my strength and my influence.

There is another woman within me. I am Psyche. Ancient and mythical. A wild and free soul. She has no need of wedding rings. She cannot be captured in portraits. She cannot be replaced by anything.

I am an element you do not understand. That is why it is easier for you to wear me like a ring upon your hand.

I was not born solely for your satisfaction. That role is far too small for me. I want everyone to see my beauty. I want everyone to fall in love with my mind. I want to nourish everyone with the goodness of my heart. I offer this nourishment to everyone. And it will never end or grow old. It is an immortal energy passing through time. It has no need of marriage, nor of a wedding ring as material proof of love. Its children are proud and free. They are not afraid to love those who are different because they love not only bodies but also souls.

I make everyone who touches me dream and burn for justice in this world. A world in which our souls are equal.

I am Eve and Psyche. I am the gentle force, the harmony that rules the world.

(Elena S. Lyubenova)