By: Manal Rabiey
I was carved from marble—
a woman not born, but sculpted…
as if I were an idea in the mind of a god who worshiped beauty but knew nothing of mercy.
Pygmalion poured his eyes, his fingers, his loneliness into me—
a man terrified of women,
who shaped me as he desired, not as I truly am.
He adorned me with gold at my neck,
with rare tullet dust on my lips,
with lashes made of shadowed clouds,
and a silence drawn from unshaken mountains.
I was “perfect.”
No breath, no question, no life.
And each night, he knelt at my feet,
whispering to me as if I were his salvation from the world.
But Venus… heard his prayer.
And breathed life into me.
I rose… a woman.
I had pulse, longing, tears that fell without his permission.
I laughed when the rain kissed my face,
I cried out when thunder startled me,
I held him like a woman holds a man—not a sculptor.
But something in him cracked.
I saw him stepping away, one breath at a time.
As if life within me was a betrayal of his art.
He wanted me to remain a statue that kept his silence,
not a woman that overflowed with soul.
He forgot…
He forgot that a woman’s fullness is her perfection,
not her stillness.
That I was not created to reflect him,
but to flood him with my being.
When he realized I was not what he imagined,
he knelt once more—this time at my living feet,
weeping for the statue, not for me.
He longed for marble,
for silence, for control.
But Venus would not answer.
So he shattered me.
He broke the body he once carved,
fractured the rib he thought he could command.
Then he tore open the vein in his chest,
and fell—among the scattered fragments of who I once was—
and vanished.
He died…
and with him, his illusion.
And I remained
no longer statue, nor woman
but a tragedy of marble and blood.
