Have you ever met the villain of a story that was not your own?
Bet you haven’t.
Think carefully now. Those nameless souls that pass unnoticed by you on the street, do you not think they have villains? Bullies, preachers, antagonists that challenge them on a battlefield they were never trained to fight in. They were, are, made, against their will, to question their time on this planet, made to consider the possibility that their time could have been better used by another. Someone more worthy of the short time given a being of basic carbon should have taken their place.
And what a cruelty it is to make another being consider such a thing. To take another out of their plane of existence and replace them with a notion, a hypothetical someone, who would better fit the mosaic of this world. They believe their edges to be chipped, unable to fit into any open slot within the grand puzzle, lest they force and wedge themselves into an opening not made for them and bend and impose upon the bordering pieces… how did they know where they fit? What’s wrong with me? Where do I go?
I have never met such a villain unless it was my own. We are all the heroes of our own stories and the victims of those around us. Should another introduce you to the villain in their life, that villain will also be a victim, I assure you. What is done to us is done to others, by us or otherwise, whether we like it or are even aware.
Oh, but are we not all also the heroes? We forget. We forget that we overcome and prevail, only to be struck again and made to be underdogs. How quickly we forget our victories the second we are knocked down.
What if we were no longer heroes or victims? What if we said,
“No. I am neither the light-bringer nor the dweller in the dark. I am the me of my own story. ”
Would your villains still be villains? Or would they simply be… people. Just people, simple sadists who watch you stumble over the existential tripwires laid along your path by life. They did not place them there, though they will be the first to point out that you were ears-deep in muddy crisis. And yet we all do it. We are the villains of someone else’s life, each one of us.
Until there are no more victims or heroes. Then we simply exist as ourselves, free of the distraction of pointing out the worthlessness of others and left to contemplate that for ourselves.
Oh, what wonderful villains we all make.
