She Needed a Hero, So That's What She Became

You told me that I had to change, so I did.

I pounded away from the sea, once bright and sparkling blue with your affection and now a cold, grey hurricane, ready to dash me to bits on the rocky shore. I toiled through Arctic cold, brain turned to ice and fingers numb like novocaine. I slaved my way through the Sahara, the very skin boiling off my back as I collapsed in the endless ocean of dunes. I pulled myself up the highest mountain, lungs choking and brain withering from lack of oxygen. And everywhere I went, I left the little pieces of myself that you did not like behind. I buried my books in the snow drifts of the north and watched my music be swept away by a desert wind. I chipped and cut and carved out all the parts of me you found “undesirable”, until my once uniquely beautiful, symmetric soul was a misshapen, grotesque shell of its former self. The quiet beauty of the stained glass window of the soul is gone - now it is shattered, because you have thrown a torch through and broken the glass.

I came dragging myself back to you, only able to keep going by my sheer willpower. And yet your sea - your sea was focused on other people now, no longer me. Your whales and mermaids and colorful seashells were someone else’s to find and treasure now - and I was chased out, once again, by the hurricane.

I tried to think of what to do - but it was as if my brain had ceased to function other than for the thought of you, for in the past few agonizing years, you and winning back your laughter and smile had consumed all my thoughts.

And excruciatingly slowly, the thought came to me that I needed a new hero.

So I became my own.

xo evelyn