Epilogue

She doesn’t listen anymore- not that she ever really did. I think, sometimes, she could hear me or sense me and direct the story accordingly. Now, she simply ignores me, pays me no mind or attention. She got what she wanted, after all, she got the satisfaction of typing out a pretty, perfect ending to a tragedy she didn’t have to survive. I think she enjoyed it, honestly. She invented a world and smashed it to pieces with plague and fascist warfare. She invented me, gave me long, black curls that flashed violet in the sunlight. I should be grateful to her that she went out of her way to make me exceptionally beautiful. My creator birthed me to be perfect. Then she took her perfect creation and battered, tortured, and exhausted it. Why breathe something so lovely into existence only to ruin it?

One might say she made me a hero. If I’d had any say in it, I would have run. I would not have dived into a burning school to save a heart-shaped locket or attempted to sacrifice myself to stop the aliens from blowing up the city. I would not have snuck away in the middle of the night to join some rag-tag teen army, no matter how attractive the boys were. I would have slept. I would have resigned myself to a fate I had no control over. I would have sat on the hills behind my house until the flood turned them to mush. I would have brushed my locks of hair and read books and relished the time I had left. I think it was Achilles- yes? When Odysseus journeyed to the land of the dead, Achilles was the one who told him that he would have chosen a long life as a nobody, not the brief life as a hero he so famously lived. I can’t help but wonder if Achilles resents Homer for his fate.

The irony lies in my fate. After an overly dramatic performance as a world-saving young woman, I get to live an idyllic life with my handsome husband and our three angelic children. I live out my days keeping peace in the society I helped create. I wake up in the morning to sunshine and laughter and spend my time in utopia. Pardon my French, but I find the whole thing to be bullshit. She left me in an endless void of complete and utter peace. Never mind that I would have much rather ended up with a woman. How could she not see how perfect I was for that other girl? The one she forced me to hate because of the painfully average guy I’m now stuck with forever. Did she really think him a reward? If I had to go through the trouble to survive to see some kind of heaven on earth, did it have to be so dull?

She began my story in a world where nothing good ever happened. She ended it in a world where nothing happens at all. And for what? Achilles shouldn’t be resentful. The pages that bear his name are among the most famous in the world. It’s not his fame that I envy of him, but the fact that Homer must have put his very soul into him. Instead, I lay in my bed with the boring family she made for me, fatigued from the missions she tasked me with, clutching a half-scorched locket with a tragic backstory, in the most predictable piece of literature she could have mustered. At least Achilles’s end is fitting for his narrative. Yes, yes, Odysseus made it home to his wife and son but didn't he go mad in the end, too? Didn't his story continue on? I must say I appreciate that she had us reading Greek classics before the high school melted.

I can’t say I know her very well. At first, I couldn’t tell what parts of me came from her own image. I started to see it in the words she wiped away. Those were the things that were too honest. She wrote about him sometimes, but he never lasted long. Honestly, I miss him. She would write pages and pages trying to make a plot for him that didn’t eventually dissolve into a tirade about their story. These passages gave me a brief reprieve before she scrapped his whole character for the third or fifth or thirty-seventh time. In the end, she took the characteristics she liked best and wove them into someone else, someone meant for me. That’s how I knew she loved him. I just wish she would have told him instead of idealizing a relationship that I had to be a part of. That’s how I came to see how much profoundness she held in her, and how dutifully she filtered it out.

I think I know that she wrote me, wrote my whole existence, to escape. Why would she want to escape somewhere that’s in a perpetual state of disaster? Oh, yes, that’s right, because none of that is real to her (yet the resolution of hell-on-earth is). I’m sure it offers hope or something in that vein. I’ll again complain that I did not volunteer to be the savior figure. If she’s so desperate for a story of heroism, why doesn’t she just live it herself? I can say with near certainty that she isn’t on the run from cannibalistic military police. It shouldn’t take an apocalypse to develop a personality. I’ll bet she knows that she would run and hide away and that’s why I wasn’t allowed to. I wish I could tell her that would have been okay. A story about a lesbian minding her own business while the rest of the world fell apart had, in my opinion, more potential. She could have given me the voice of a poet, musing about heaven and hell as they lingered near. I could have contemplated the natures of chaos and order. He could have been there too, the angel Gabriel, harbinger of truth at the end of the world.

Of course, that’s perhaps what she wanted, too. She was afraid no one would care what a young woman thought about the demise of humanity when they could follow her around as she ventured to prevent it. I take it back, now that I think about it. I don’t picture her pleased with her work, willfully ignorant of its drawn-out grotesqueness with a finishing touch of underwhelming pseudo-happiness. I think she gave up. She is not simple; she is scared. She knows that we both deserve better. I can only hope she figures it out before she dreams up another perfect projection to carry her regrets.

I would say something, but she never listens.