Looking for the second spider

Wait, where is it? I could have sworn it was right there?

How many spiders in one room is too many spiders? Usually, I would say one. One spider per room is okay. That is unless there were two spiders before and now there's only one spider left. There were definitely two spiders, right? Where is the second spider????

In this case, where the second spider has relocated on its own, the ideal spider-to-room ratio is two to one; I'd rather have two visible spiders, than one in sight and one on a secret adventure.

I'm in my bedroom and it's just three days until the launch of The Aphrodite Project and I'm thinking about spiders instead of the many edits and tweaks I still need to make to the project, or the Substack post I was set to write and post today (hi, welcome, happy reading!!).

The spiders in our bedroom aren't particularly skilled at weaving: they have long, lanky legs, a tiny, round body. Their webs are awkward and I've never witnessed a successful catch. And still they weave.

I write about spiders weaving as a way to avoid dealing with the project, to avoid making progress and editing and potentially discovering that there is no way to make it better. Instead, I end up face to face with it, with Aphrodite, again.

It’s all connected. Woven together, if you will.

I've been weaving this story for at least six years now.

It started a 2019 monologue titled Something Something Predestination. While the “something something” in the title gives a clue to the absence of a clear plot – there was none to speak of – it was vaguely about Aphrodite, her birth, and predestination.

The main question: was she always destined to become the goddess of love, of beauty, of desire or was there, in the myth of severed genitals, seafoam, and eyes of onlookers, space for free will and self-determination? Could she have been a different goddess if she had wanted to?

I thought this project was a monologue. Then I thought this project was a play. Then it was a novel. Then it was a draft, a journal almost, of short, vaguely connected, related scenes. Then, after meeting my boyfriend, a visit to Bali, and finding Orpheus and Eurydice in the Indonesian jungle and wild beaches, it became what it is today: a podcast play reimagining Greek mythology in modern dating.

The core question of predestination has shifted, but now, with the release date inching closer, I find myself revisiting it. Is this project the result of predestination or just sheer stubbornness?

I’m reminded of Penelope, queen of Ithaca, wife of Odysseus. She waited twenty years for him, weaving and unweaving a burial shroud to delay choosing a new husband. By day, she wove. By night, by torchlight, she unraveled her work. For three years, she persisted. Out of faith or pure stubbornness.

Eventually, one of the suitors discovered her trick, right as Odysseus returned home.

Where Penelope focused on the unweaving of her work, I'm avoiding weaving my own, instead getting distracted with thoughts of spiders weaving.

Francis is resting on my leg. I have a cold and a headache and am PMSing and just spent some time crying over, well, frankly, nothing. Maybe it was because my microphone isn't working properly and I need to re-record something, more likely I just need to drink some water and read a book. I still haven’t located the second spider.

I wouldn't have known The Aphrodite Project would be what it is today, three or even one year ago. I doubt I would have been able to finish it, if I hadn't met my boyfriend, or rather, it wouldn't be the same story. Luckily, we met. I really like this plot. And him.

The Aphrodite Project exists and all the steps it took me to get here, to this week, were absolutely necessary. So, was this predestination? Was it destined to exist, the same way Aphrodite is destined by her narrative, her birth to become the goddess of love? The same way spiders are destined to weave a web?

I don't think so. I think, like Penelope, the fact that this play, this podcast, exists is really down to stubbornness and determination and maybe blind faith, that wavers but never fully ceases to exist. I think maybe the stubbornness, the persistence was predestined. A character trait. But the destination was really up to me. To us, once you start listening to it.

It wasn’t predestination but determination and support of friends and many second guesses to end up here, with a finished product.

I resist the urge to put “finished” in the previous sentence in quotation marks. The work happens before the certainty. It feels awkward and clumsy and you’re really unsure if you’re even doing something but somehow, that doesn’t mean you stop.

Even now, with the release just days away, I feel doubt clutching at my chest, paralyzing my limbs whenever I set out to make final edits. Even these last moments are really still a question mark. I don’t know if this web I’ve woven will work. Maybe I am like the spiders in our bedroom in that way.

Maybe two spiders in a bedroom is fine. Maybe the second spider is the friends we made along the way. Maybe the second spider was me all along.