Great Oak Gazette

Evangeline Apostolopoulos’26

Staff Writer

I think sometimes it’s more important to meet the villains in our stories rather than the heroes. Now, before I begin, I want to preface something: I am not a negative person. Nor do I believe that every terrible thing that happens in our lives is simply a stepping stone toward building character or a story to laugh about twenty years from now while sitting around a fire with your colleagues. 

Sometimes the negative things that happen in our lives are just pure, unlucky coincidences—and we have to suck it up and move forward, not dance in a web of disaster replaying that thing in our heads.

So. 

Back to my purpose. 

I think sometimes it’s more important to meet the villains in our stories than the heroes. Granted, these grand heroic people and their grand heroic gestures can very quickly—or sometimes too slowly—pull us out of a hole.

A deep, dark, hollow cavity in the Earth that swallows us whole, only to spit us back out with a helping hand from our hero. 

And typically, we are blind to who the hero truly is. I mean, they are not actually heroes. Sometimes, heroes don’t pull us from darkness at all. Rather, we’re walking in plain light, and they simply add a spark to it—seemingly out of nowhere. Random, yet never questioned. Just accepted.

But it is when acceptance becomes fantasy, fantasy becomes delusion, and delusion becomes insanity that the hero in our story—you know, the one who sets off a flame in our hearts—either sparks a new beginning or lets us breathe again. They take off their crown and reveal their spiked horns, green eyes, and scaly skin. Because sometimes we become so enamored with these heroes and their place in our lives that even the thought of ill intent or wickedness feels suffocating. So what do we do? 

We cling to them all the more. Whether they know it or not, we hold onto our heroes with our chubby little hands—greedy for love, attention, and comfort. Sometimes it’s a friend. Sometimes a lover. It doesn’t really matter because this other person cannot fulfill what’s missing in you. Or maybe you’re not missing anything at all—maybe you just long for something to fill the hole in your chest that yearns for what it has never felt before.

And that spark of a person that makes the hole in our chest ache. So you know, deep in your bones, that this is exactly what you needed—what fulfillment felt like. 

But it was all a delusion. It was all fake. You made it all up. And now, the person you thought would hold you closer to the stars has turned into the villain of your story. The story you thought would soon become ours. Something you believed would blossom into eternity. 

This person—or rather, the idea of this person—may not even know you well. You are just a silhouette on their canvas: blurred, retouched, and erased multiple times. Back and forth go their decisions to keep you in their painting because you were never the focal point.

But maybe they never thought that to begin with. After all, 

You made everything up.