You’ll never understand, not really. I think you’ve tried, but you can’t understand me. I can’t even understand myself sometimes.

I should have warned you from the beginning: Never let a writer fall for you. All it takes is a second too long, a sideways glance, an intoxicated smile, and suddenly I am writing what I know.

I am writing you.

Once, you told me you didn’t want to be in any of my stories. “I don’t want you thinking about me more than is necessary,” you said. But to stop writing about you is to stop thinking about you, and how can I do that, when you are part of almost every waking thought of mine? You are the smile when I get a text from you, you are the hug that lingers too long, you are your laughter, which is soft and sweet when I am close to you. Leaving you means leaving these things, and I can’t do that.

If you didn’t want to be in my stories, you shouldn’t have broken my heart.

From now on, you will be a part of every story, of every plot, in some way, shape, or form: a character here, an interaction there, a few scenes scattered throughout the book. You are my muse, after all. That’s what happens in a situation like this. You say you don’t like anti-heroes, but now you’ve become one.

And what does that make me? I was never the heroine of my own story, even before you came along.

I was always the villain. I see that now.

But that’s okay; villains are always more powerful, anyway. Writers are always advised to develop their antagonists just as much as their protagonists, or the interactions between the two will be unbalanced.

And they’re right. But no one ever tells the story of the villain and the hero who tried to work together. How, when she went on her destructive rampages, he always tried to save the day, which didn’t always mean saving the world. Most days, it meant saving her from herself.

He realized it was too much after a while. Too much destruction and too many emotions. And Superman told her this before taking off into the sky and flying away from her, flying away from everything they’d ever had.

She swore to herself she wouldn’t need saving again.

✣ ✣ ✣ ✣ ✣

Being with you has made me realize that I am a storm. My eyes are a constant rainy gray, and I shoot lightning from my fingertips. There is the constant rumbling of thunder in my thoughts, charged and brewing. 

Storms are powerful. And so am I, I guess—more than I’ll ever know.

EDITOR’S NOTE: On August 30 at 2:58 p.m., we changed “your” to “their” for pronoun consistency.