Every Story Has A Villain
Despite my noble quest for redemption, I became the anti-hero in my own story. Maybe even the villain.
I set out to right wrongs—mine and hers. A relationship littered with broken pieces asking to be reassembled, like tabletop puzzle with an unclear image of the future.
I’m always confident I can fix anything. Houses, motorcycles, plants, busted phones. I have this stubborn inner dialog, the kind you get after years of forcing yourself to learn in your home, garage and garden. There’s an inner peace that comes with fixing and saving things. It makes you believe you’re not broken yourself.
But fixing relationships—and yourself inside—is different. Especially when you don’t know which parts are missing.
It’s always easier to repair a triangle of problems than to look at your own internal shipwreck.
In the story of my internal shipwreck, Cris was the lighthouse and moral compass. Not in the way of saving my ship, but in showing me how easily I could batter myself against the rocks. She didn’t push me against the seawall. She guided me there. Staying silent while I called for help, it felt like she almost wanted me to crash.
She watched me self-sabotage everything we were trying to grow. Maybe not intervening and stopping me was her way of being the heroine. By disappearing when I needed help the most, she forced me to stare at what I planted and how I let it rot.
A hero doesn’t abandon someone in pain. But maybe as a redeemer, she showed me the consequences of the course I unintentionally plotted for myself and its affect on our relationship. I can fix motorcycles, but not journeys. I can mill, cut and bond wood, but I can’t re-glue broken trust.
———
The mystery man enter stage right. Is this a plot twist? Or easily foreshadowed? The misplaced puzzle piece that fit into her life a little too quickly. Did he emerge just after the emotional meltdown? Or was he waiting on the dock, watching the storm unfold?
They called it “love.” Most would call it emotional escape. It doesn’t matter what I think or called it. It wasn’t about me at all. I know he wasn’t the villain – just a lifeboat she chose to climb aboard when my internal ship went down.
Still, I can’t ignore the role he played.
Is he the character foil? Can’t be “the hero.” Maybe just a well-timed distraction. But he helped brake “the cycle”. His entrance disrupted the narrative Cris began to write: Owen evolving with superpowers of the “manipulative narcissist” she feared he was beneath the kind and gentle facade.
And maybe I was?
No. It’s impossible. My inner dialog in my natural state wouldn’t allow that. But what if I wasn’t myself? What if I was unknowingly corrupt? What if the things I couldn’t fix inside me were bigger than I understood?
But maybe there are no villains or heroes here. What if this was never that kind of story?
What if this was a Shakespearean tragedy, taking place in a cluttered garage, a tangled garden, and a serene marina?
————
“A story of a man who could fix, grow, and care for everything—except himself.”
In the moments he needed to most, when fate tested his inner strength and will to change, he failed.
He told himself it was the circumstance of his environment and not for his lack of effort. But deep down, he knows neglected plants don’t grow to their full potential. Love doesn’t either.
————-
Why her? Why was she the lighthouse?
She had the four-corner markings. Not tattoos, not scars—something deeper. The birthmarks that completed the pattern of my own. When I saw them, I felt them burn onto mine. It felt like the lost puzzle piece clicking into place. We were magnetic together and shined light into each other’s sky.
But even the most beautiful magnetic Northern Lights die too. Or disappear behind clouds. Or you miss them because you were too busy fixing the wrong things.
Maybe I’m not the villain or the hero. Maybe I was just a character narrating the beginning of someone else story.
And narrators don’t get happy endings.