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He’s a bit… much.
Here’s the thing: he knows he’s a bit much. He knows that he yells when he’s excited and mutters when he’s upset and sings whenever he’s not yelling or muttering. He knows that he’s sensitive and airheaded and forgetful. He knows that in social situations he gets dizzy with noise and color and emotion until he can’t see the people in front of him, and so he blurts things out, hoping to at least to get a laugh, something to clue him in on how his audience perceives him.
(There’s always an audience, isn’t there? All the world a stage, and he feels like he’s playing a part, stumbling his way through a dance routine, until he gets on an actual stage with his lyre and suddenly feels as if he’s come home.)
People (Mr. Hermes, but not just Mr. Hermes, Persephone and the tavern patrons and the engineer who drives the train) call him an artist. It is a euphemism. Eurydice, in their first meeting, is more honest when she laughs and lightly says he’s crazy. “Poet”; “muse’s son”; “touched by the gods”; all the things people need to say to justify him, to explain to themselves that although he is sensitive and strange and annoying (he knows he is) they get something out of it so he is worth keeping anyway.
(They are wrong: if singing was his gift, if he was creative and smart and talented and capable of making anything beautiful then why would his mother leave him? He pretends to be a Muse, but he is not one of them. The Muses look on him as nothing, judged him worthless before he could sing a single verse. The Muses give beauty to the world and he gives them his jagged, uninspired thoughts. What value could his words possibly have?)
“You apologize too much,” Eurydice tells him, then giggles when he starts to say “sorry” and stops himself with a grimace.
And she is laughing so he cannot be the reason she stops laughing. He pulls a face so he doesn’t say what he wants to, which is:
“I felt the despair come off you in waves when I met you in the underworld. I feel your fear rush to meet me each time you call my name and I don’t reply. You scoff when I profess my love, even though it’s only in play, and you roll your eyes when I work on songs, even though you tell me it’s fine. How can I not apologize to you?”
He says none of this out loud, and he is nothing if not a good actor so she does not guess he leaves things unsaid.
Here’s the thing: he knows it was his fault. His lover is resourceful and strong and always practical. She would not have ignored him for a song. She would not have denied him love until he left in search of someone else. She tried to stay, he just made it too damn difficult with his singing and staring into space and never looking up to find reality staring him in the face.
So he knows he has no right to feel hurt by it. No right to stay up at night watching her face in the moonlight, terrified that the next night she will be gone. No right to feel… to feel… to turn away sometimes, to pointedly not look at her, because looking makes his chest go hot and tight. He is resentful, angry, and his anger is the ugliest thing in the world. He’s tried to strangle it and shove it down but it always returns, and he apologizes for it, and he is nothing if not a good actor so she still thinks that he’s apologizing for leaving his laundry on the floor and she tells him he apologizes too much.
Not nearly enough, he thinks, you bear the burden of my presence every minute my heart beats and I could never apologize enough to keep up with that.
Here’s the thing: he knows that he shouldn’t dream about it, shouldn’t wish for it, but still: nothing had ever felt so right as when the workers in Hadestown were beating him senseless. The sick mix of animal fear and the flush of belonging that usually came only when he sang was intoxicating. It is a perverse thought, one that no one sensible and normal could ever think.
It was also horrible, and in his heart of hearts he fears the pain and never wants it to happen again. It is a cowardly though, one that no protector worthy of Eurydice and her fragile trust could ever think. He would take a hundred beatings for her, he would, but both of them find it hard to believe when Hermes puts a hand on his shoulder and he cries out, tears already hot in his eyes.
Orpheus hates pain. Orpheus does not cut himself, Orpheus dips his fingers in salve and cares for them when they get torn by his lyre strings. Orpheus deserves to hurt, but his body goes through the motions of healing itself instead and he is a good actor so he pretends this is what he wants.
Here’s the thing: he is the fool who let his lover suffocate underground. None of the singing in the world could make up for that. If he gave hope to a thousand souls in bondage, raised up crimson flowers in the darkness, charmed a wall into falling down, it could still barely cover the start of what he owes. It does not excuse that he let it happen. He ignored his lover’s cries because he heard a melody in the storm and followed it, he let the storm hit him and never looked up.
It does not excuse that he a poet. A muse’s son. A mouth to feed, a stubborn problem. An overthinking, oversensitive, trapped-in-his-head-until-he-cannot-function-in-the-real-world child. There is no song so sweet it makes up for what he lacks. There is only Orpheus, tone-deaf until he is on a stage, useless until it’s time to play, worthy only in three-hour bursts until the patrons get tired of his songs and stop clapping. When the performance is over he ought to fall silent, get tucked neatly back in a case like the lyre, turn to wood or to stone until next time he’s needed, but he doesn’t.
He is alive. It is too much. He is too much. All the songs in the world won’t make up for it.