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Odysseus is gone.
Calypso should be used to the loneliness. She'd felt it for years upon years, centuries spent in solitude. Compared to that, Odysseus was a presence in her life for barely a heartbeat. She should've slipped right back into the comfortable blanket of apathy.
And yet, for the first time since the start of her banishment, she is enraged.
She's angry for a moment, and then Odysseus is too far over the horizon to see anymore, and she stays angry. Calypso stews in it, lets it consume her. How unfair is it, that the gods rip everything from her? How much must they hate her? It's only when she's happy that they seem to notice her at all, and then that's simply to take and take and give her nothing at all as recompense.
Was it all another punishment from above? Did Zeus chuckle to himself as he thought of poor, miserable little Calypso, feeling joy for the first time in centuries only to have it ripped away from her? Hermes had given an obnoxious snicker as he delivered her the news, smiling all the while, brushing off her pleas to let her keep Odysseus if only for just another moment. Calypso was sure every god got a good laugh out of her loss. How amusing, to be the victors and to watch others suffer.
And how cruel was Odysseus, to leave her. After all she had done? Everything she gave to try and make him happy? How could he just stand up and leave, with barely a word? Were seven years worth nothing to him?
Calypso stays angry. She lets her rage be all she feels for five days straight. And then, like when Calypso was a child, so furious with the unfairness of the world but realizing there was nothing to do with that feeling, the anger quiets, and all that is left is grief.
Once Calypso notices her sadness, it's all-encompassing and suffocating and inescapable . It consumes her every moment. She wakes thinking about Odysseus, and he doesn't leave her mind until she's unconscious again, and then he returns to her the moment she wakes up again with no one at her side.
Her anger with Odysseus has mostly died in the span of less than a week. She can't be upset with him when she would give anything for his company again. She can't even blame him for leaving- if she was given the offer to leave, she would've taken it too.
There is nobody in the space beside her when she wakes. There is no response to her words when she speaks. There is nobody sitting on the beach staring at the horizon for hours on end besides her.
Was this the feeling that had driven Odysseus near mad? It must be- Calypso herself is half tempted to test again the limits of her immortality, to see if the sharp rocks her love had tried to throw himself off the ledge onto could take her life, too.
They wouldn't. Calypso knew that. So instead, she slept, and when she woke, she rolled over and went back to sleep.
