Absurd heroism

Sisyphus became my friend sometime before the sun rose, treading through a cycle of tides and feeling them for what they were.
Sisyphus’s epic story is one of talking his way out of the Underworld over and over. Hades appears before Sisyphus’s earthly entity to personally fasten the handcuffs that will condemn him to the Kingdom of the Dead for all Eternity. Sisyphus, notoriously Kvothe-minded, drags curiosity so thin that Hades is hoaxed into securing the handcuffs around his own wrists.
Sisyphus stores the god of the Dead in his closet for a few days…
… which really screws everything up because nobody can die, and so Hades is released. Sisyphus, fairly certain that he’ll soon be dragged by the shoulder blades of his Spirit to the depth of the realm of the Underworld, asks his wife not to bury his body once he’s lifted from it.
And so Sisyphus, awaiting his Eternal Assignment, smooths his way around Death by persuading Persephone of the urgency of returning to Earth for a moment, give or take, to bury his corpse so that he may cross the River Styx.
Sisyphus returns to humanity, tastes sunshine, runs his hands through soil, soaks his heart in glassy streams, tilts his head back with the breeze, and becomes too enamored with his Earthly existence to return to the infernal drag of Death.
He lives a few more sultry, saturated years on Earth before Mercury emerges to tuck him into Tartarus, where his boulder awaits- ceaseless suffering for cheating Death.
See Sisyphus tearing his muscles, scraping his palms and cheekbones leaning into the boulder’s skin and weight, slipping beneath a loose foothold and sweating and red and his eyes.
Every journey up the hill has the same goal, the same peak, but not every journey up the hill has the same meaning. Same goes for the descent, when Sisyphus feels all too human to be a tortured soul, when we feel his consciousness, his new, ephemeral autonomy over the placement of his feet. Surely if Sisyphus descends in Pain, he can descend in Joy. Maybe not surely.
Maybe the gods were granting Sisyphus eternal purpose, shifting meaning moment to moment, journey to journey, through a constant means. Without intending to, they may have damned him to a meaningful afterlife. Sisyphus will never find himself aimless or drifting because there is meaning in his suffering, though he may not have chosen it for himself.
Is meaning worth more if it is self-imposed?
So maybe Sisyphus’s suffering isn’t meaningless, but that doesn’t shake the suffering, and it doesn’t shake the look in Sisyphus’s eyes, stalling and tugging in those few moments when the boulder lingers before tumbling over itself to the plain.
Sisyphus, you’ve not been forgotten.