Elisabeth Writing

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Sometimes, the only thing that saved me was music… and reinvention.

“Free Falling” by Tom Petty–  I saw my dad before he died. I don’t mean that I held his hand as the light faded away, or that I saw his last breath leave his body, or that I was there when he coded 1, 2, 3 times. I wasn’t with him. I was around 850 miles away at the time. I’d left Florida to come back to Ohio, because he was being moved to a rehab facility and my uncles were there to help my mother with his care. I suppose we were all… hopeful, maybe. Why would they move him from the hospital to rehab if he wasn’t going to make it? 

And so I left. 

And he died.

I remember waking up, on the night before the worst phone call of my life. I saw my dad sitting beside my bed. He didn’t say anything. He just sat beside me and smiled. I smiled back and let my eyes drift shut. I didn’t think about how odd it was that he was in Ohio, when I’d just left him behind in Florida. I didn’t think about the look of peace on his face. I didn’t stop to think about the implications. I just felt warm, and comforted, and with him beside me, I fell into a deep slumber. 

That morning, when the phone rang, I think I knew. My stomach pitched and roiled as I answered my mother’s call.

“Hello?” My voice sounded so hesitant. So afraid. 

“Dad’s gone, baby. Dad’s gone.”

A primal wail emerged from my belly as I curled around myself, the phone slipping from my fingers. I don’t know how long I yelled, or wept. I wonder if that’s where the lore of the banshee came from: that deep, earth shattering scream when the world is ripped out from under your feet. Death isn’t painful for the ones who leave, but for the ones left behind. 

My boyfriend at the time, Trey, held on to me tightly. I wanted to scream until I had no breath left. I wanted to tear the curtains from the wall. I wanted to knock over the furniture I’d repainted, because they were from my father, and why had I repainted them anyway? I wanted to leave this place, too, because it didn’t make sense to me. How could he just be gone?

I should have seen it coming.

He’d been fading for years. Losing weight rapidly, barely able to walk around the block, and eventually he couldn’t eat or drink without a feeding tube, because it was too risky with his aspirating pneumonia. We had to chide him for eating lifesavers and the look of absolute anger and resignation on his face made me want to cry. Who would want to live like that? My father and I used to split sausage and biscuits, pancakes and eggs, sipping our coffee and adding ice to the mugs, always in sync. He’d tell me to look outside and then steal the last of my pancakes while I squawked in outrage. I always ended up laughing, because he looked like a little kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. My father would take 20 mile bike rides and compare his tan with mine (I never got as tan as him, though I always tried). My father loved eating, drinking, laughing. And at the end, his life had none of that. Why would he want to live like this? This sad existence where he couldn’t even have a fucking lifesaver for fear that it would go into his lungs, that it would fill them up with scar tissue until he couldn’t breathe.

I remember the night he went to the hospital. I was in Florida visiting my family and I was in my room when I heard a heavy crash and my mother’s shriek. I ran into their room and saw my dad on the floor, unresponsive. My mother was in hysterics but I shoved the pain and fear deep, deep, deep down. I snapped out the order, “Call 911!” And knelt by him, trying to wake him. 

He didn’t wake up. 

When the EMT’s came, I was holding onto my sanity with slippery fingers. I pointed them to the bathroom, where he was covered with his own defecation: he was dying. He was dying and they were making jokes. When the woman EMT began to walk away, I lost it. “He’s not FUCKING BREATHING!” I shouted at her back. I don’t know what she was thinking: something like, just another addict, needs narcan, just another idiot who hit his head. But he wasn’t an addict, and even if he was, who gave a fuck? Addicts deserve kindness and help just as much as anyone else. I knew that better than anyone.

Now, though, my daddy was dying and they weren’t doing anything. I was ready to run into the ambulance myself and rip things off the wall, ready to try anything and everything to save him. Eventually they got him on the stretcher, and my face was wet with angry and terrified tears. That same EMT grimaced at the mess he’d made and I honestly wanted to slap her across the face. My mom followed them to the hospital, and I cleaned up the bathroom, retching in fear. 

He was in the ICU for days. He wouldn’t wake up. I sat there with my mom and Sheila, my sister and her boyfriend, Michael. We watched him. We waited. He woke up, eventually, and was transferred out of the ICU. But I could almost see the writing on the wall. I could see the messy, scrawled message: he’s dying. He’s dying. He’s dying.

I knew it.

I didn’t want to know it.

I don’t think any of us wanted to know. Even when we… when we wrote goodbye letters. 

The doctors said he had a 60/40 chance of survival. We took that and ran with it. There was still hope.

Hope: such an elusive and painful thing. Is it better to have it or not? I still don’t know. 

Since he seemed to be improving, and since they were set to move him to a rehab facility, my mom suggested that I go home and get back to work. As a massage therapist, I needed the hours and the money. And so I did. 

Mom told me, later, about the ride to the rehab facility. About how he coded three times. About how he woke up, not knowing her. About how, when he recognized her, and what his body had done to him, he looked panicked and absolutely done. It made her cry.

When he coded the last time, and they said he had brain damage, my mother and my father’s brothers made the absolutely horrific and impossible decision to not revive him. I can’t imagine how that felt, having someone’s literal life in your hands. And yet I knew, in my heart, that she made the right decision. My daddy hadn’t been living for a very long time, and she knew he wouldn’t have wanted to keep going the way he was: on a feeding tube for the rest of his life, lost in his own mind, unable to even go swimming in the ocean, which was always his place of peace. This wasn’t his life anymore. He was a shell long before his soul left his body.

She told me that on the way home, the song “Free Falling” came on, and she knew it was daddy saying, ‘Betty. My sweetheart. I’m ok. I’m free.’ 

I came back to Florida. I was wrecked. I didn’t even get to say goodbye, not really. All I wanted was a hug from my daddy, but he was gone. I felt… completely broken. We were missing the heart of our family, and that hole felt huge, pulsing, sucking us into its entirety. I envied Lexy her tears. After that first phone call, those first tears, I couldn’t cry. I felt cold and dead inside, like someone burned me from the inside out and then salted my earth, barring it from growing ever again, casting winter over every other season. 

At his wake, everyone gathered to tell stories about John Heffernan; the most wonderful, frustrating, funny, creative and intelligent man any of us had ever known. His brother, Tim, talked about my father playing airplane: how he’d open both the passenger and driver door and speed down rainy roads. He talked about the poker game where someone accused my father of cheating, and how my father literally kicked him out the door. When Tim said, but John, you were cheating, my father, with a crackling grin said, “Yea, but he didn’t have to call me on it like that!” We all laughed uproariously. I heard tales about my father’s strength, Big John, Tall John, man could he fight! I told the story about when he got pulled over by the police for some minor traffic violation, and how the police officer was so charmed by him – and his perfect driving record! – that he let him go with a warning. There were so many stories about his charm and his humor. But more than that, I heard stories of his kindness, his gentleness. Stories about his creativity and artistic eye: the beautiful things he made with his hands. I heard the story about how my mother knew she was in love with him: when, at the wilderness program they met at, he put a troubled kid on his knee and held him, wiping away the wayward one’s tears and comforting him. I felt tears stick in my throat, remembering the way he’d done the same with all of us, all of his girls. I heard stories about the small kindnesses he would do unto others with no expectations. I remember how he was always bringing me cheesecake so we could discuss which one ranked as the best. It was our thing, one of many. He was always doing things like that, including people and making them feel loved. 

My dad did not have an easy childhood; it was abusive and difficult and filled with issues. It might have turned a sensitive young man into a brutal giant. But it didn’t. He turned into the best father. The most kind, loving husband. A fantastic friend. A hard worker. A joker. A wonder. He would have liked this wake: full of good food and alcohol, everyone laughing and telling great stories, celebrating his life rather than mourning his loss. 

Although we did. Mourn. 

Now it is sunrise, and my family is at the ocean. I kicked off my sandals as soon as I got here, like I always do. The sand is cool between my toes, and I shiver, aware of my body in a way that I haven’t been, in days or weeks or months. The crash of the surf is quiet today, as if it, too, is grieving the loss of its greatest pirate. I imagine the murmur of the waves: he will become a part of this, you will see him in the way the sun glints on the water, you will hear him in the calls of a blue whale, you will feel him in the waves, be they great or small, to tickle your toes or knock you down. He is here; with us, in us, a part of us. As above, so below…

I’m sure that one day this thought will comfort me, but today it only widens the gap between John Heffernan the man and John Heffernan the soul. I want his French toast and his smile, not his whispered words on the western wind. I wish I could cry, but I still can’t. 

People slowly begin to trickle down to the shore for my father’s unofficial sunrise service. There will be no funeral, no casket, no flowers. He wouldn’t have wanted that. He wouldn’t have wanted people to look down into his waxy face and remember him that way. He would want them to remember Tall John Heff. Not the body he left behind. Not the cancer. Not the last few years of pain. He would have hated some preacher saying sermons about a man he’d never met or known. He would have hated the bunches of white calla lilies and the soft sobs reverberating in the pews. 

He’d want this: informal, on the beach, rising with the sun.

My mother decided to cremate him, and today we’ll scatter some of those ashes, with the people who loved my daddy the best. They mill about: surfers and fishermen, bartenders and artists, parents and children; anyone he touched, anyone who wants to be here with all of us to say goodbye for the final time. Dad’s friend Brian brought a guitar because my dad would have wanted music. 

“Everyone, pick up a shell!” My mother orders, and everyone compiles. “Now, take one of these markers and write a message to John. Then we’ll all throw them in the ocean.” 

The ocean seems amused by this, roaring quietly as people take the shells and scrawl their messages. Michael, Lexy’s love, is asking for John’s blessing to marry her. A surfer friend of dad is asking him to say hello within the curl of blue and green waters, the next time he passes through. A misfit kid turned teenager is thanking him, for never making fun of him, and for always listening. I don’t know what to write on my shell. I miss you, seems too quiet, too simple for all these calamitous feelings. How could you leave us, seems selfish, and small. What am I supposed to do now, dad? How am I supposed to keep going without you? I don’t know how to do this life without you. None of us do. How are we supposed to go on? 

That’s what I really want to know. How? How in the world do you fill a hole like the one Tall John left? How do you begin to fill it without his teasing, his annoying humming, his never-still fingers, his stained glass eyes, his purest gold heart? How? 

It’s like I can feel the tears rocking inside of me, howling at the absence, wild and caged and empty and twisted. But they won’t come. Nothing comes but trembles that overtake my entire body, shivering like I’ll never be warm again. A hypothermia that comes from the cold of grief, rather than from snow and ice. A deeper chill that no amount of fires or warm blankets can fix. 

I love you, daddy-o, is what I write. I walk to the edge of the water and hurl it in, wondering if I’ll catch the flash of a merperson’s tail, or the fin of some sea creature waving hello (or goodbye), or if the sea will spit out my message with alacrity. But the shell sinks, down and down and down, and I slump over, exhausted. My mom and sister walk over to me and we all put our arms around each other. My head goes onto my mother’s shoulder, I can feel Lexy’s tears on my skin, and my mother is solemn and quiet as she looks out to sea, waiting for the man she loved to return, in whatever way. 

I can hear the guitarist Brian begin to sing “Amazing Grace” and so, with a last little wave, we walk up the beach: a united front of woe and endurance. Betty lifts her face, and her voice, joining in. I join in as well, though my voice is scratchy from the unsung tears. Soon we are all singing it together; singing this last song to the man with the biggest heart, singing so that he’ll find his way in that walkway of light and peace. 

I hope Spirit, our white German shepherd and the best dog in the world, who passed away a few years ago, nudges my dad with his nose.

I hope Uncle Pat is waiting on the other side with a tanqueray and tonic and a goofy grin. 

I hope he hears our voices, warbling and wonderful, and pauses on that spectral threshold for just a moment, remembering those of us on earth who did, and always will, love him.  

“Kirby” by Aesop Rock- 

I’ve heard it said that lightning can’t strike the same place twice. I know that’s a myth. Lightning can, and does, strike the same places often. Tall buildings and trees, especially. I’ve seen the after effects of storms: the charred ground, the split trunks, the burning embers. Sometimes it makes beautiful things, like glass, when it hits the sand in just the right way. 

And sometimes, when that metaphorical lightning strikes you, Zeus imparts a gift: a feeling of crackling awe and omnipotence, the unwinding metallic thread of power that makes your blood sizzle and pop in your veins. Like you’d arrived at the gates of Mount Olympus, a conqueror at last, spitting out a tooth and grinning with feral delight. 

And there: Venus. You don’t understand the twinkle in those multifaceted eyes, or the way that this “conquering” seems predestined, in some way. You don’t feel your heart shifting within your chest, making way for thunderstrokes and devotion, bulging and shrinking and twisting to fit it all… 

You don’t know any of that until it’s too late. 

Later, after I’d been kicked down those pearly steps, after the manic euphoria, the heartbreak and tears, I wondered: could lightning strike the same heart twice? Because I always thought it was only a once-in-a-lifetime thing, that kind of love. I’ve been convinced, since falling in love for the first time, that I’d never feel that same kind of joy or pain again. Everyone always says that your first love is special, that to compare anything else after that is silly, because you can’t love like that twice. You can’t love like it’s the first time again, because it’s not the first time. You are not young and innocent. You are not a child becoming a woman. You are not naive or innocent or wild in the same ways. 

Ever since that first love, I’ve been trying to find my way into the heavens of Mount Olympus once more. And knowing, simultaneously, that I won’t. 

Lightning has struck my heart and left scars, a gift and memory from the gods themselves. There’s no way that will happen again. I have to accept that. 

But… grief makes you do strange things. 

Like searching for lightning.

And… I found it, when I became the only lightning rod in a witch’s garden.  

After my father died, my mother and I decided we needed a fresh start. Neither of us wanted to live in any place that had memories of Tall John attached to them. We didn’t want to wander along the sea wall at the fort in downtown Saint Augustine and remember how my Ariel kite got caught in the reedy waters. How I cried with all the rage and sadness in my little girl heart until my dad laughed and said: “She was a mermaid. She wanted to go back to the ocean.” We didn’t want to walk past the pier and remember going to Mango Mango’s with dad and splitting coconut shrimp and burgers and Keylime pie, how my dad worked there briefly and always left everyone with a smile on their face. We didn’t want to walk down Walhalla ravine and remember riding in the cab of his Subaru Brat, the blur of green and gold, strapped in with seatbelts as he roared the car into the hushed magic of that place, injecting it with his own brand of it. We didn’t want to wander past our old house and remember about how he’d put his touch on every part of this place: the gingerbread trim, the dormer window in the loft, the clubhouse he’d built for his mischievous daughters, the Japanese maple. 

We wanted a fresh start. A place free from loss. It was too raw, and we were too tired from our grief. And so we decided that maybe we should relocate, together, to Asheville, North Carolina. After all, her brother and sister-in-law had moved there a few years ago, and it looked so beautiful and peaceful, a small town perched in the blue ridge mountains. What enchantments might we find there?

Mom, her friend Sheila and I all moved into a small neighborhood in Asheville in June of 2019. I found a job 30 minutes away as a massage therapist and it felt, finally, like things were coming together. 

I was still feeling lost, and lonely, and I decided I wanted to meet people. So I downloaded some apps to find something. I wasn’t sure what. 

Something to pull me away from the gaping hole in our family, to help me scramble away from that linear edge. 

Something to turn my face away from the gleaming bottles of wine and gin that seemed especially appealing in Carolina light. 

Something. Or someone. 

I’d been in North Carolina for a few months, disinterestedly going on dates, or having dinner with one of the girls I’d met on Bumble BFF, or watching shows with my mom that made me laugh. There was a certain gentleman who had been quite thoughtful and lengthy in his conversations with me, but I’d found it hard to stir up any real interest in the life around me. Because what was the goddamn point?

Still, as I scrolled through our conversation and looked at his photos again, something sparked in my chest. Something real, and alive. And then the words flew through my fingers: would he like to, you know, actually meet?

Yes, he said. Later, he told me he was out at a concert with a couple friends, kind of a double date, when I asked him if he wanted to meet up. He said the stunned joy, the shock, the thrill, was immediate. He said he lost interest in the girl he was with, all because of me, some words and a photo through a screen. It was enough, he said, later. 

We made plans to meet at a small cafe called Odd’s. I got there early, like I always do when I’m meeting someone. I like to stake out my territory and settle into the atmosphere beforehand. I was in line getting a smoothie when the door swung open. I don’t know what made me look up, why it was that noise, that entrance that caught me; but it did. I watched as he walked in. And I knew, right then, that life would never be the same. 

Vaughn came to me, like a dark carnival ushered in on a wicked, wild storm. 

(Remember: I was the lone lightning rod.)

He had messy auburn curls and eyes that seemed to devour the world around me, though I couldn’t discern their color. He was sporting a scruffy beard, cargo shorts and sandals, and his eyes met mine: something in that gaze was so intense that it cut me to the quick. Could he see the lichtenberg scars, my love story of pain and burdens and effervescence? Could he see the deeper wounds that other men had left, the ones that had never healed, the screams caught in my throat, the fear keeping them raw? 

He approached me. 

Do you know in the movies where everything kind of goes soft and out of focus, except for one spot of absolute brilliant clarity? That’s how it felt, when I saw Vaughn. Everything faded away except for those eyes, the solemn look on his face. 

Later he told me that for him, I seemed to glow, a bright spot in an otherwise dull and empty cafe. Like magic, he said. 

Green. His eyes were green. Not my green, not a light sheen of jade and amber. No, his were like the shadows that played over moss in a deep and untread forest. He came up to me in line and I babbled about getting a green smoothie and how the chai here was really good. I didn’t even know what I was saying, just that I couldn’t look away from that color. I’d never seen it before. 

My cheeks were pink as we sat with our respective drinks – he had gone with the chai – and we talked. We were both sober, which was a first for me, since I’d never dated anyone who was sober, like me. We ended up talking about depression, and grief. Afterwards, he told me he could see a darkness in my eyes and that intrigued him, since his eyes were that, too; reflected ponds of trauma and magic. It was such a dichotomy, he would muse, to my sparkling radiance, my glowing aura, my shy smile. 

Oh yes, I’d found my lightning. 

After that date, we were both done for. We were infatuated, enchanted, obsessed.

You’re a goddess, I’ve never met anyone like you…

What is this feeling? Are you my soulmate, my twin flame?

The world wants you like I want you. You’re gorgeous, sexy, perfect, real.

Could you be him, my Panther? At long last? 

I can’t even believe you’re real. Your writing and your eyes and you… where did you come from? 

Where did you come from?

I feel like you literally come from my mind. You’re my dream girl. Like your blonde hair, your eyes, your breasts like peaches, your long legs… 

I feel like you’re my dream. This dream I’ve been wanting to make into reality. And you’re here. I think my heart knew you. Is that crazy? 

No. It’s not crazy. 

For a while, everything was perfect. We were curled in the darkness of his room, whispering endearments and making plans. We tangled our fingers together and spoke about the places we’d travel to, our trauma, our pain and our delights. He broke the chain of my first love and we went higher, higher and even higher. After all, why climb the stairs to Mount Olympus when Hades himself can carry you in his arms? We were breaking the last boundaries between mortality and immortality. He was taking his throne and tucking me in beside him, daring anyone to cross him with those deep green eyes. 

I will never tell you that I was an innocent fresh-faced goddess of spring, kidnapped by a savage king of the underworld. I wanted those keys at my hips, the freedom to come and go from that place as I pleased. I may have looked like a simpering, nectarous goddess of fertility and flowers. But, no. The loss of my father, that bitter bereavement, had changed me internally. I was an overripe orchard, rotten fruit decaying on the ground, bumbling flies fat and sated. 

I exhaled pollen into his airways.

I crowded his heart with briars and roses, until it hurt.

I paralyzed him with cherimoya fruit, which I fed to him with my own honeysuckle-stained fingers.

I was mad, unhinged and unwise. 

He painted over my lichtenberg scars with lines of caked blood and delicate, sculpted sheets of metal. I admired the way my body looked like armor, even when he was the one hammering at my bones.

He told me he loved me – with a knife at my throat. 

He soared with me on man made wings and then let me fall, shrieking; then he caught me at the very last moment and soothed me with longing, with soft kisses and words of praise. 

His lightning was black. It was made from the dust of the cosmos, the ground bones of the unlucky ones in his own realm, and dark alchemy. I learned to like the way the taste of blood filled my mouth when it hit me.

Like he learned to like the way my nails, tipped in hemlock, split his throat. 

It felt good, to hurt, in a new way.

Until sometimes it didn’t.

I can’t trust you, ever. You’re a liar.

I’m not safe with you, I can’t tell you my truth.

You’re pathetic. Basing your art on sensuality. No one will take you seriously.

You’re a prick, stuck here in the mountains. 

I think I hate you, sometimes. 

I think you do, too. I think I hate you sometimes.

Leave, then. Go.

I will.

And I would… for a while.

And he would let me… for a while. 

Until I came back, begging for the lightning. For him.

Until he showered me in effusive praise, worshiped at my feet and thighs. 

I used to tell him: in every ending, it’s us. You are my prologue. You are my epilogue. You are my story. I can’t live without you. I don’t want to try to live without you. I love you more than I’ve loved anyone or anything. I feel like a hollowed out honeydew without you – nothing but the empty memories of sweetness. 

Please, don’t go. It’s us… it’s always us.

We hurled words at each other. I got in his face and screamed. He stalked towards me, a cold and frightening look on his face. I wept. He cried. And then, delicate, butterfly kisses. The bristles of his beard on my jaw, my collarbones. The diamond, the swan, that hurt: both good and bad. 

We are driving, stocked up on orange soda and chips, caramel popcorn and KitKats. Our hands are bound. Our mismatched socks make us laugh, remembering the day we sat with our legs crossed over each other, listening to Wu Tang and saying, for the first time: “I love you.”

We are Persephone and Hades reunited. Kirby by Aesop Rock is on, and it’s comforting. It’s his favorite artist, and I like knowing these things about him, learning every tiny detail.

Right now we will forget the agony we cause each other, the vile words, the little insults. 

Right now it’s perfect.

Right now I’m high on that black lightning.

And that’s enough.

“Get Free” by Lana Del Rey– Get free, Lana says. Get free. Get free from the woman who attacked you in a drunken fit, get free from the toxic relationship that makes you flinch as you remember it  (though you find yourself longing for him, still), get free from the erratic and wounded child that you are, and become a woman at long last. 

Get fucking free, Liz. 

It took… a lot. A lot, for me to leave all of these situations. It took a night filled with cops and blood. I hid, in a hotel room. It took another go at it, with Vaugh; I had to watch how quickly it all fell to pieces. It took moving in with an acquaintance named Erica, who then became my best friend, my sister, my lioness, my fucking freedom and my fire. 

It took realizing that Vaughn was a mirror, and that I needed to look at myself: my own issues, my own past, my own unhealed trauma and wounds. After all, you can’t just shove it all in a closet and hope that it never comes out. The skeletons bang and clatter, they make your teeth chatter; they make your own bones ache to be free. 

I remember driving away from Asheville, driving through Berea, Kentucky, and remembering every moment in the hotel, at the pumpkin patch, in the haunted house. I wept and wept as I talked to my friend Erica. I felt like black lightning had incinerated me from the inside out, and I would never, ever heal. If you peeled away my skin, you’d find coal and charred edges. The smell of burnt flesh and serpentine hair.

But I started healing. Slowly.

It took an accidental photo in buttery sunlight, which set off my own imagination. I could be a faerie. I could be a goddess. I could be a faun. I could be anything, with a little makeup, some elf ears, and jeweled stickers on my cheeks. 

I found joy in the gods and goddesses that I found in the briars and the sunflowers. There, Cernunnos, in the folds and sun sculptures between the leaves. There, Venus, in the sheen of an abalone shell. There, Hecate, in the dark flickers of my pupils as the candles burned to nothing. 

I found hope in my counselor, Miguel. He walked me through my trauma. He showed me the booby traps and the cages I had built, for myself; showed me the rabid girl I’d left in the pit to starve, wounded and snarling. I was her. He showed me the woman drowning in tears, too big for her tea cup ship, too big for the decayed snapdragon skulls. He showed me the water moccasin wounds; how to suck the venom out, to be less poison and more pure. 

And now, here I am, at my altar. I am wearing black feathered wings and a gauzy red dress that whispers not sweet-nothings, but sibilant spells. I can feel energy pulsing in my hands and veins, like fizzing bubbles popping in dark, hungry flames. 

Today, I was an avenging angel. My sword ached for blood, my red mouth, smeared with blood, did not smile. 

And tonight, I am a witch. 

I am me. 

I am the dagger in skeletal hands, beckoning to the undersold gates; I am the scythe cutting back old growth to make room for the fated blooms of spring.

I am the Queen leading her troops to bloodshed; and the peasant demanding revolution, standing on a pile of ravaged corpses. 

I am the Crone at my bubbling cauldron; I am the mother holding life in my palms; I am the maiden running off with the warrior. 

I am the villain. I am the wounded. 

I am me.

Who is she?

I’m finding out.