Orpheus

The night was pleasant; the breeze felt fresher and purer than the air-conditioned chill of my cabin. There’s a coolness that only the night knows how to offer, an air that feels cleaner, more alive. I sat outside, leaning against the wall, letting the silence wrap around me. It was silence punctuated now and then by the croaking of frogs and the soft rustle of leaves. I took my smartphone out of my pocket, looking for some distraction, and there I was, in the middle of my watch, watching “Kaos.”

Orpheus soon appears on the screen: Orpheus is the one who doesn’t know how to accept a goodbye. George O’Neill gives him the face of a man who never learned that love has limits and needs to be accessible for love to be love. He went down to Hades. He couldn’t bear losing Eurydice because he believed that the force of his music, the force of his will, could bend the rules of life and death. But what he does, deep down, isn’t out of love. It’s out of not knowing how to let go.

The face of Eurydice, played by Helena Reyes, didn’t need to say anything. She had the calmness of someone who had already accepted fate and knew that life would move on even when we didn’t want it to. Orpheus didn’t understand this. He tried to drag her back and force a return that wasn’t desired. And there, sitting in the night, with the breeze blowing gently, I thought: how many of us do the same? We insist on holding on to what is already gone and trying to reverse what cannot be undone.

Cormac Doyle’s Hades isn’t a tyrant but merely an observer. He looks at Orpheus like someone who sees a man lost in his vanity, confusing persistence with love. There is no harshness in Hades; there is only the reality that what is gone has its place. What Orpheus does is fight against what already is. And there is violence in that. Wanting to bring Eurydice back is wanting her to be a prisoner of his desire. To love, sometimes, is to accept the goodbye, to know when it is time to stop.

The night lingered there, calm and full of secrets. The wind carried the smell of earth, which reminded me that some things need to stay where they are. And there, with the smartphone in my hand, I felt that maybe this is the lesson Orpheus never learned: that love is not a tight knot but a thread that loosens when the other wants to leave. There comes a moment to let Eurydice rest in peace, without wanting to pull her back to the world of the living, without forcing a story that has already ended.

The frogs kept croaking, and I sat there, breathing in the fresh wind, purer than the air inside the cabin, feeling that the night was telling me more than the series. And I realized there is beauty in accepting what’s gone. I knew that the greatest act of love might simply be letting time do its work, letting what is lost remain lost. Sometimes, the only way to love is to know how to say goodbye and let the night take what needs to be taken.