42 Warrior Princess

Lily had been a fussy baby. Her exhausted, confused first-time parents were products of a generation that hadn’t been known for its emotional intelligence, and had often chalked her fussiness up to pure attitude. Baby Lily had been alert and vibrant, as if trying to cram as much living into life as she could, hence her vehement—and shrill—opposition to nap time.

She’d learned to walk early, learned to talk early, had definitive opinions early. She’d fought the reading lessons, not wanting to sit still for the endless repetitions of letters and sounds, but once she’d picked it up, she’d found her great love. She read voraciously, read everything she could get her hands on, even if she couldn’t understand much of it. Her parents punished her by taking her books away, not knowing that Lily would have multiple books hidden, and that, in a pinch, reading the dictionary would do.

Her brothers arrived, and their family moved through the seasons of life.

Her parents were fairly religious and raised their children to be the same. Her mother was the more traditional of the two, and her father, for all his belief that he was incredibly progressive, enjoyed the benefits of a traditional marital household, and took steps to maximize that benefit.

Her parents had not been a particularly good match, not in Lily’s opinion anyway. Lily had thought from a young age that their relationship was imbalanced. Her mother ran the house, raised the kids, did the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, managed appointments, took them to school and to sports, helped them with their homework. Her mother could be critical, but Lily had always been eager to please, and she liked spending time with her.

Her dad worked, then he came home tired, and often didn’t have the energy or time to play, so he watched TV in the living room, ate his dinner in front of TV in the living room, preferred to spend most of his time in front of the TV in the living room. Her father was physically there, but he wasn’t much of a source of emotional support, something that Lily, a deeply emotional child, had craved. Her dad had been happy to engage with them when it came to things that interested him though, and Lily had been just as enamored with fantasy as he had. He’d read her The Hobbit as a bedtime story, establishing her love of that world early. They’d often watched movies together, and occasionally shared books, but never been as close as she’d wanted.

Her parents fought fairly often over disagreements that Lily couldn’t understand. A normal conversation would turn into a screaming match over nothing. So Lily stepped up and did more than her mother asked her to, because if they weren’t stressed, then they wouldn’t fight so much. Right? Lily became close to her mother, and always joined in on the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning. She tried to not need things because her mother was exhausted taking care of three kids, and when Lily needed things, it made her cranky. So Lily learned to try and take care of herself.

She figured that it would be good practice for when she got to be a mom, because moms figured stuff out. She’d always been praised for her maturity, for being an “old soul,” but sometimes Lily was painfully aware of how young and confused and desperate to please she was. She was happy to help, but her brothers were never asked or expected to do the same. The imbalance bothered her.

The central part of their lives, church, was fun as a child, but as she got older, things got strange. The adults at the church had commented for as long as she could remember that her parents would have to watch her; Lily was so pretty—and a redhead!—that of course she was going to be trouble.

“She’ll be a real temptress if you’re not careful,” a church elder had told her mom one Sunday, patting Lily on the shoulder.

A lot of the adults had laughed. Her mom had remained silent, lips pinching in disapproval, but not at Lily. She’d kept Lily close every Sunday after that. Lily, who had been eight and taken the lessons in Sunday school to heart, fretted about it for weeks. She didn’t want to be one of those bad women who tempted men away from God. She’d been wearing a nice dress that her mom had picked out, and her mom wouldn’t dress her to tempt men, would she? Maybe adults just had odd senses of humor?

Lily didn’t want to be trouble, but as she grew up, she seemed to be anyway. She couldn’t stop. She was too rambunctious, too curious, too mouthy, not friendly enough, not quiet enough, and she certainly asked too many questions.

Lily loved questions. She wanted to know everything. The world was so wide and wonderful, and people were so complex and interesting, and there were such amazing, fantastical stories, both real and fictional, she wanted to learn it all! She loved seeing how things fit together.

But as she grew from child to preteen to teenager, her questions were received with increasing hostility. Her youth leaders didn’t like that she had questions about the Bible, about God, about things the church had done or things that alleged Christians had done in God’s name. She wasn’t supposed to question the Bible, and certainly not God. But she did. Because she wanted to know! She wanted the facts! The lack of answers bothered her, and even when she did get answers, she usually had questions about them too.

At school, when she learned about evolution, about science, about stars and space and history and other gods and belief systems, she loved how most things had an answer. And if not a definitive answer, at least people had gone to great lengths to discover one. People explained things. She spent most of her allotted computer time at home looking up things she’d heard or read, getting more information, ending up on new information trails. She soaked it all up like a sponge, but especially the information from the fantasy books she read and movies she’d seen. She had watched her dad’s Jurassic Park VHS tape so many times she wore it out. Her dad had told her proudly that she was a nerd, like him.

She wondered if she wasn’t built for blind faith. Problem was, that’s what the church, and God apparently, wanted. But why would God have made her in such a way that it was hard for her to believe? Why had God made her to love physical touch when that was not something that was appropriate? Why had God made her difficult? That’s what the youth leaders and her parents said she was, anyway. Difficult.

It all started to unravel as a preteen, when her youth group was separated by gender and the girls began their lessons.

Lily hated those fucking lessons.

Purity lessons. Spiritual warfare lessons. Modesty lessons.

Bare shoulders were a temptation. If they had to wear a tank top, they had to make sure it had thick straps. One-piece swimsuits only for youth group outings to the pool, and they had to wear a T-shirt and shorts over it anyway. As their bodies developed, if their youth leader, Suzanne, saw their nipples through their shirts because of the cold, she called them out of the water and had them sit in a towel until their nipples weren’t showing anymore. Lily got into the habit of constantly pulling her shirt away from her body so that her hard nipples didn’t show and she could swim longer. Skirts were dangerous. They made boys wonder what they had under them. Lily had pointed out that the boys already knew they had bodies, so obviously they already knew what was under there. She’d been told to sit in the hall for ten minutes.

She’d stewed about it the entire time.

The neckline of their shirts was another issue. One finger width of skin below their clavicle was fine, two was pushing it, three was “loose behavior.” Lily’s mother wore modest V-neck shirts all the time, but more than three fingers worth. When she’d asked her about it, her mother had told her that she wasn’t showing any cleavage, and to remember that Suzanne didn’t know everything. Lily didn’t know what to believe, but she didn’t want to be a temptress, and she still heard the comments from the adults at church about how she’d grow up to be a heartbreaker, so she figured that she’d err on the side of caution.

“Are you a target or a treasure?” Suzanne had asked them over and over. “If you dress and act like a target, you will be treated like a target. But if you dress and act like a treasure, you will be treated like a treasure.”

Lily had rankled against all of it but kept it on the inside. Perhaps it all felt and sounded wrong because that was Satan’s influence? Just like how seeing boobs on TV made her feel funny in the same way that seeing shirtless men made her feel funny. The boob thing was probably Satan’s influence too.

Her world fell apart completely when she was fourteen and went over to a friend’s house for a birthday sleepover. Her friend’s older, sixteen-year-old boyfriend showed up for the fun night of movies and games, bringing over some of his parents’ alcohol, and Lily had a glass of mostly margarita mix, rebellion crackling gleefully through her veins. The boyfriend drank more than that. Later, when most of the girls had gone to bed, Lily went upstairs to use the bathroom there, since the downstairs one was busy. The boyfriend was staying in the guest room up there, and when Lily had walked by…he’d grabbed her.

She remembered the smell of the alcohol on his breath. She remembered fighting him, asking him what he was doing, demanding that he leave her alone, telling him that she wasn’t that kind of girl. He’d slapped her hard enough to make her see stars.

She hated herself for freezing, but she’d fucking frozen.

Scared. She’d been so scared. Hands on her body, grabbing, pinching, hurting in ways she couldn’t understand. She’d snapped out of it when he started pulling her pants down around her thighs, fury roaring up inside her. How dare he?

When he gave up on her pants and started fumbling with his own, she kicked him hard enough to knock him on his ass. She bolted out and down the stairs, grabbing a blanket from the couch and sprinting through the sliding door into the backyard to hide in the playhouse for the rest of the night. She’d shaken and cried silently, terrified that he would find her.

She’d prayed. She’d asked God why. What had she done to deserve that? She’d been wearing her baggy jeans and a crew neck T-shirt from summer camp. She’d done everything right. She’d behaved. And yet…

The next morning, she snuck into the house early and found her bag, getting dressed and laying in her sleeping bag as if she’d been there all night, trying to warm up. When everyone woke up, she joined the other girls for a pancake breakfast, made by her friend’s mom. They’d all yawned and laughed. Lily was quiet, ashamed. She didn’t tell her friend, didn’t tell anyone.

She didn’t want to disappoint or upset her parents. Her mom might understand, but she also might be mad that Lily had let that happen, because she had, somehow, right? Her dad would be furious, but probably not at her. She didn’t want him to do something that would get him in trouble, because that would be her fault too, and she wanted her dad around.

At church the next Sunday, she asked to talk to Suzanne, hoping that she might have some answer or comfort, help Lily understand. But when Lily explained, shaking and nauseous the entire time, Suzanne shook her head sadly, disappointment palpable.

“You need to beg God for forgiveness, Lily. That only happened because your faith has been lacking. If you’ve really been living for Christ, that wouldn’t have happened to you. God was trying to get your attention in a big way, because he loves you. You should really examine what’s been going on in your heart that led to this happening. And,” she’d sighed, “you need to pray for your future husband’s forgiveness for this. This is a stain on your purity as a result of your lack of faith. Pray that your husband is a forgiving man.”

Lily’s faith died in that room, withering further with each word out of her trusted youth leader’s mouth until nothing was left.

Her whole life had centered around God and his teachings. She’d done everything, she’d followed the rules, she’d tried to behave, but it was never good enough. She was never good enough. Her whole life she’d been threatened with an eternity in Hell if she’d strayed from the straight and narrow path.

Fine. So be it.

If what had happened to her in that room had been an example of God’s love, then she didn’t want it.

What kind of love was that?

It wasn’t.

She’d never heard God’s voice like some people claimed to have, never felt his presence or comfort in her soul. She didn’t know if he was real or not, but she’d had her doubts for years. Even if he was real, fuck him. Fuck him. If he was real—something in her soul told her that there was at least some kind of higher power out there— where was he?

Lily went home a different person. All the uncertainty and questions and fear she’d been taught for years, the hideous shame of failing to fight that boy back, of feeling his hands on her body against her will, all of it festered.

And she grew angry. Furious.

Lily had always been told that her emotions were too intense, and she’d tried to mute them. She stopped minimizing herself as much. Her head constantly felt like it was full of a whirlwind of coal dust, dark and howling and confusing. Everything felt too much. She hated everything, but mostly herself. She tried to be nice, but she hurt so badly, and no one saw it, or if they did, no one seemed to care. Her tongue was so sharp, cutting even when she didn’t want it to, words flying out of her mouth before she could stop them.

Her parents wrote it off as teenage moodiness, and she got into fights with them over everything. Her clothes, her hair, the time she spent in her room, her refusal to go to church anymore. Her mom had insisted that the church might have its flaws, but that God was flawless and a relationship with him was necessary. Lily disagreed. She hated herself a little more every time she made her mom cry, but she wanted to do things differently! She’d tried to explain what had happened at the party to her mother once, but fear and shame had choked her when her mother asked why she hadn’t come home as soon as someone pulled out the alcohol. She’d always hated disappointing her mom, knowing the stress and strain it caused, so she decided to avoid the subject.

Lily turned to her reading, learning life lessons from all kinds of books, but especially fantasy, and even romance. Before her assault, she’d found romance books fascinating. All she’d been taught about sex was that it was something married adults did, and it involved a bed and touching and was how children were made. She had no idea that sex was supposed to feel nice until she’d found a romance book in a thrift bin when she’d been eleven, and she’d bought it because apparently it was about saving a horse, and she loved horses. To her shock, there was a scene where the woman and cowboy had sex by a campfire—and they enjoyed it. Further research had been necessary. She loved the idea of unlimited pleasurable physical touch with someone she cared about, and who cared about her.

She didn’t stop reading romance after her assault. Romance novels actually opened her eyes to the reality of what had happened, and what could have happened. The characters’ traumas helped her understand what assault was, and that it wasn’t God trying to get her attention. She inhaled story after story of characters falling for each other and going on adventures, choosing to love each other even when they were flawed.

Between romance novels, fantasy, and an assortment of other fiction, as well as time on the internet, she learned what she’d never been taught. That what had happened to her was not her fault. That asking questions was a very good thing. That other people had questioned the church and God. That the Bible wasn’t a perfect translation like she’d been led to believe.

The foundations of her world cracked, and as she aged, she kept trying to rebuild them. Every time she thought she was solid, something would come along and rattle her. Inside, she still hurt so badly it felt like her heart and soul were shredding themselves. She couldn’t understand it, couldn’t explain it, it just hurt . She stumbled upon an article online about dangerous behaviors in teenagers that mentioned self-harm. So she’d looked up what that was and wondered if it might be worth a try.

Lily only harmed herself on her thighs and hips, where no one would ever see. She might have refused to go to church anymore, but she still wanted to be a good, nice girl. Good, nice girls didn’t have scars where people could see. The pain on the outside was supposed to help the pain on the inside. It didn’t. Lily just felt guilty and hated herself a little more.

She was fifteen and a half when she snuck into her parents’ bathroom on a Friday night and grabbed a package of her father’s sleeping pills. Her note was on her side table. She cried the entire time, until she fell asleep. She didn’t want to go. It just all hurt so badly. She hated herself so much for failing to be good, to behave, to defend herself, to make herself better; she wanted it to end.

She woke up on Sunday afternoon. Woozy, nauseated, and chilly, but alive and…relieved. She’d often spent whole weekends alone in her room, so no one knew what she’d done. As she lay there, she was struck by a lightning bolt of clarity. She didn’t want her life to end; she had shit she wanted to do. She still wanted to find real, supportive love. She still wanted to be a mom. She just wanted the emotional pain to end. There were options for that. There had to be.

So, she staggered to take a shower, then set about researching trauma and therapists, and discovered forums of survivors. She asked her parents if she could see a therapist, and her mom found one recommended by a lady from church. Lily was apprehensive and only went to one session, hating that the woman’s main concern was her prayer schedule and faith walk.

So she fought to heal herself. She failed a lot and often, but she learned to forgive herself and seek out other coping mechanisms. She stopped hurting herself. She tried to be nicer, tried to work harder, tried. She flirted with boys, made out with a few, enjoyed their tentative, excited hands. Her heart raced like a chased deer the entire time, but she’d been determined to reclaim her body and discover sex and intimacy on her own terms. She graduated high school and headed off to college with optimism, ready to discover who she was away from her parents and family.

There, she made real changes. She found a non-religious therapist through the college’s counseling and psychological services and set about unpacking her life, realizing the positive and negative ways that she’d been impacted by her parents and religion. She picked up extra hours at her retail job to pay for her sessions, and for fun extra things, like a string bikini and her first tattoo. She threw up in the bathroom when she wore the bikini for the first time, confidence faltering and a childhood of shame training rearing up to condemn her from the past. But she rallied and went out to flirt with one of the girls in the hot tub, which had made her nauseated again, but had also been deeply arousing. Accepting her bisexuality had been a slightly long and terrifying process, but immensely fun and freeing too.

Her first tattoo, a stack of books entwined with flowers on her thigh, had felt right in a way that she’d never experienced before. The first step to covering her scars, but more than that, it felt like a step towards reclaiming her body. Like finally hanging pictures in an apartment to make it feel like home.

Her head didn’t feel so messy and dark, but she still struggled with the fear and belief that her emotions were too intense for other people. Her friends didn’t seem to have any problems dating, but Lily…well, she could find and usually enjoy a sexual partner easily enough, but she never had a mutual interest in someone.

Her friends started to get married, to build lives, and Lily was there to cheer and love and support them through it all, but it hurt. A different, quiet hurt, one that she, in her early twenties, was better equipped to process and understand than she had been as a teenager.

She graduated college and ended up working in customer service, as she always had, trying to laugh off the comments about a “real career” from family. She liked being social and helping people. She got her own apartment, delighting in filling it with books and decorating. She hadn’t delighted in her mother’s loving but backhanded comments every time she visited, but she and her mother had always had differing opinions about what was “clutter” and what was “decor.” Her small home was hers. Her life was hers.

Lily moved through her twenties and past thirty with an increasingly strong sense of self. She usually liked working with people, but she hated having to cater to the whims of selfish, entitled idiots with no backup from management. She moved between jobs every few years, sometimes working as a secretary, sometimes in retail. Money was always tight; she spent hours poring over her budget, scrimping where she could while still trying to enjoy life. Her parents bemoaned every tattoo, but she loved them.

She started defining herself by what she was and what she liked, instead of who she wasn’t and what she hated. She liked tight pants, ripped jeans, short shorts, corseted tops, low-cut shirts, tiny bikinis, and dresses that either hugged each curve or fluttered over her skin like a caress. She liked pretty lingerie, scouring the internet for sales. She loved her body, perceived flaws and all, and came to adore her red hair, letting it spill down her back and grow longer than she’d ever let it before. She liked sex, but wondered if emotional connection would amplify the experience. Her friends said that it did. When appropriate, she swore with ease and frequency. Fuck was such a nice, round, versatile word.

Her old church community had no idea what to do with her. Many tried to witness to her and bring the prodigal daughter back to the church family. She refused politely at first, then less politely when boundaries were crossed. Her parents tried to love her as she was, but Lily knew it was difficult for them to respect most of her life choices. Her brothers had long since left the church as well, and they all commiserated about their parents’ attempts to redevelop their faith. She and her brothers had never once doubted that their parents loved them, but their dad hadn’t been particularly loving , and their mother had cried at dinner more than once over her fear that her children would burn in Hell.

Lily tried to be kind, but she eventually realized that she would never be one of the sweet and gentle people of the world. She wanted to be, but, as a friend once told her, “There is teddy bear nice, and there is momma bear nice. You are momma bear nice.”

A point that had been proved when a friend called her for help escaping an abusive boyfriend. Lily drove over with pepper spray and the baseball bat she kept by her bed for home defense, ready for battle. Hell, almost excited for it. She’d hated the fucker ever since he raised his drink at a barbecue and her friend flinched, terror in her eyes.

Her willingness to shed blood aside, the opportunity never presented itself. Her friend had sprinted out of the house with a garbage bag of her belongings, thrown it into the back of Lily’s car, and they’d sped away. Her friend, with a black eye and split lip, sobbed out the whole awful story. Once Lily got her settled with another friend in a different city, she sat in her car, seriously debating going back and “accidentally” running the bastard over. Repeatedly. Her Corolla was small, but anything at sixty miles an hour would hurt. Her friend hadn’t known what she was thinking, but she begged Lily not to do anything, scared of what her ex would do after. Lily had little intention of leaving him alive, at least with working body parts, but decided that the jail time wasn’t worth it. She went home, weeping for her friend and how scared she’d been.

At thirty-two, after a month of being fatigued and nauseated, with a constant low-grade headache, she went to the doctor. The random bruises that showed up with no rhyme or reason were what spooked her the most. Her doctor was mildly concerned but assured her that, since she was fairly young and seemed to be in good shape, it was probably something minor.

He ordered a batch of testing, and they’d waited to see if it would be covered by her insurance. Lily got the call that the health insurance company had denied coverage for the testing, as it had been deemed “not medically necessary.” She grumbled and cursed the whole damn healthcare system, but especially the greed of her insurance provider—and had done it all again when she saw an article reporting record high profits for that particular company later that year. There was no way she could reasonably afford thousands of dollars’ worth of testing, so she stocked up on over-the-counter meds and made some lifestyle changes, hoping that the problem would sort itself out.

She left her job when a new batch of management cut everyone else’s pay and created a nightmarish working environment. Eventually, she landed a new job that she liked well enough. Her coworkers were cool, and the pay was decent, despite the lack of any additional benefits, but physically, she still felt crappy all the time.

It only got worse. And worse.

When she found the lumps in her armpit, she caved and paid for a doctor’s appointment out of pocket, trying not to panic at the possibilities. One deeply concerned doctor and a hefty chunk out of her bank account later, they called her in for the results.

There, sitting in a scratchy blue chair, her heart racing like it was trying to cram in as many beats as it could before the end, Lily learned that she was going to die. Soon. Then her car didn’t start, and she knew that, for the first time in her life, there was absolutely nothing she could do. Even with treatment, all she would do was buy herself a little more time. Miserable, painful, shitty time.

Everything in her screamed to fight. She’d always fought. She’d been born for it. Fought nap time, fought reading lessons, fought to ask questions, fought to defend herself, fought to be better, fought to learn, fought to love herself again, fought to live life on her own terms.

But she couldn’t fight this.

The drive to her parents’ house was the worst drive of her life, but she arrived with resolve. Her mother smiled when she walked through the door, certain that Lily would, at worst, need a minor surgery of some kind. Her dad emerged from the living room to give her a hug and ask how the drive had been.

Standing in the kitchen, with a voice that sounded stronger than she felt, Lily told them as gently as she could that she had an advanced and aggressive form of cancer, and she had perhaps a year to live. Her dad raged, furious at anything and everything, unable to handle or process anything other than anger. Her mom wept.

“There must be something,” her mom sobbed, looking oddly frail as she sat on one of the stools. “Treatments.”

Lily shook her head, throat tight. “No, Mom. They said, maybe if we’d caught it early, but not now. Now it would just”—she’d choked—“prolong it.”

Fucking health insurance company. Fucking greedy CEO.

Her dating life was abysmal, but she’d still held out hope for love, for a family. All those times she’d held her friends’ and cousins’ babies and played with the kids, hoping that, one day, she’d have all that too…wasted hope. The little bitty pair of baby socks with tiny swords and cartoon dragons on them that she’d bought because they were too damn cute to resist, wondering if someday she’d put them on her baby’s kicking feet…so stupidly optimistic and probably weird. Even if she hadn’t gotten any of those things for herself, she wanted to be there to share them with the people she loved. She wanted to be the kick-ass auntie with cool stories, not the aunt who died young and none of the kids would remember.

“When do you start treatment?” her dad snarled, pacing back and forth like a caged tiger.

Lily fought to remember that he wasn’t mad at her, he just defaulted to anger when things got hard. She couldn’t manage his emotions for him at that moment. Her own were threatening to drown her.

“I don’t.”

Her mom made a keening sound that Lily would hear in her nightmares.

“I can’t…” Lily bit the inside of her lip and struggled onward. “I can’t afford it.”

Perhaps if she’d gotten a roommate instead of living alone. If she’d never gotten tattoos. If she hadn’t gone on that trip to the East Coast with her friends— No. No. She refused to think that way, to regret the life she’d lived. The decisions she’d made.

“We’ll loan you the money. We’ll get a second mortgage on the house—”

“No.” Lily shook her head firmly. Her nose stung, but she battled back the tears. “I don’t want that. I don’t want to be in pain any longer than I have to, and there is no way in hell that I’m ruining your lives financially and destroying the boys’ inheritance. B—” Lily fought to maintain her composure. “Burying me is going to be hard enough on all of you without…that.”

“Please.” Her mom sobbed, while her dad slumped against a wall, anger melting into grief, putting his head in his hands.

Lily walked over on shaky legs and knelt in front of her mom, taking her trembling hands, offering what meager comfort she could. Part of her wanted to scream with frustration at their selfishness— she was the one dying! She was the one in pain! But the rest of her understood them. She’d had a whole car ride to think about it. They were in shock.

All she had to do was die. They had to watch their child suffer and die. Lily wouldn’t have wished that on her worst enemy.

“Please don’t make me bury my baby,” her mom wept brokenly. Lily was destroying her. She could see it in her eyes. “Please. Please. ”

Lily’s tears finally spilled over. They clutched each other’s hands for a long quiet moment, pain filling the air of the usually comfortable kitchen.

“I’m scared.” Lily’s quiet admission slipped free before she could stop it. Her mom’s agonized gaze softened. “I don’t want to die.” Lily choked, tears running hot and thick down her cheeks. Her mom wrapped her in her arms. Lily gripped her back, her mother’s familiar perfume filling her nostrils. She let herself sob. “I don’t want to die.”

Her dad came over to hug them both, and they all cried together.

Her brothers handled the news differently when she’d told them. Tommy went eerily still and silent, which she’d expected, given that he was the most emotionally reserved of them. What she hadn’t expected was the silent tears and the fierce way he’d gripped her in a hug. Tommy didn’t cry, and he certainly didn’t like hugs. Ryan shook his head when she started explaining, and kept shaking his head until the very end, when he held her so tightly that her lungs ached while they cried together.

She gave up her apartment, moved back in with her parents, and got rid of most of her belongings. She went downhill fast after that. Her brothers were always coming to visit, and they’d play Mario Kart , talk shit to and about each other, revisit old stories, watch movies. Her friends had families and lives, and couldn’t visit as much, but they called often. People from the church community reached out, with suggestions for faith healing, and one notable sales pitch for the efficacy of essential oils. Lily blocked them.

She tried to stay pleasant, tried to not be a whiny, miserable, bitchy patient, but on top of the increasingly awful way it felt to exist in her body, she was ashamed. Ashamed of the way she hadn’t fought, ashamed of the way she just let it happen. She’d justified it emotionally, physically, financially, but the shame of surrender was a bitter taste in her mouth.

Old, conditioned guilt told her that she’d brought this on herself by pursuing passions and not wanting to do less enjoyable jobs for better benefits, by getting tattoos and enjoying her collection of smutty books, and a litany of other “sins.” Common sense and two decades of deconstructing her faith told her that she’d done the best she could with what she had.

God wasn’t punishing her for fucking a girl in a church parking lot that one time, or for anything else, but if he was…well then, Lily had a lifetime of anger to vent, and she figured she’d be seeing the big holy sonofabitch soon enough.

She’d known when death was coming for her. Something in her soul whispered that it was time, and that that bedtime would be her last. She called her brothers, said she felt ready. Told them she loved them and would see them again. She hugged her dad; as tense as their relationship could be, she’d always loved him. Her mom brought her water and sat on the edge of her bed.

“Thanks, Mom,” Lily rasped softly, her hand too weak to do more than rest on her mom’s. “For all of it.”

Her mom gave her a sad smile, so Lily hugged her with all her meager strength and told her good night. When she left, Lily put on music, listening to a wide array of songs as she stared up at the ceiling, feeling her body shutting down, feeling the pain seep away bit by bit.

“Okay,” she’d whispered, closing her eyes with relief. “Okay…”