"I rummage through my backpack for a guidebook and turn the pages till I find the myth of Demeter and Persephone that I’d scanned earlier in the taxi. This time I pore over it slowly, and it dawns on me that the myth tells my story.
Persephone never saw Hades coming. She was jerked out of her nice, sweet life and plunged into a dark underworld. On one level, she was abducted into her own depths, forced into a deep and painful confrontation with herself. Yet the time she spent in the underworld is precisely what transforms her from a naive, untested girl into a mature and conscious young woman. I reread the part of the myth in which Persephone eats the pomegranate seeds. Is that the moment she accepts the complexity of her experience and really takes it in? I wonder: instead of retreating and hiding, instead of pining for the way it was, what if I accept the way it is? This strikes me as both the most obvious thing in the world and the most profound.
It occurs to me then that Persephone came back. I could come back, even if at this moment I don’t understand how. There is an end to this."

Ann Kidd, Traveling with Pomegranates

I will return.