Someday down the road, someone will call me the heroine, and others will all agree. Someone will call me a protagonist, someone will call my death a noble one. Someone will defend me. I will be the subject of hours of discussion. I will become a world unto myself. People will remember Catherine and Heathcliff as the most twisted of love stories, and when they think of eternal bonds, they will think of us locked in the embrace of death upon the moors.

People will say we make the wind blow and the stars dance, and I will not be there to set the records straight, because I am dead and not even my daughter's pretty face or Heathcliff's madness can save me. I died the way a heroine should, midway through the book. I realized I was a character long before, when the dog appeared from no where, appearing on the lawn so close I could not run. Those things do not happen in any real world, only in fiction.

The life of a fictitious character is a calm one, and peaceful, if the character merely allows it to be. There are two eventualities: you die within the course of the story, or you gain never-ending life in the hanging ending of a story twisting around on itself. Hareton doesn't die, you see, and when you read this, he will be just as alive as you are. Go look. He is on your shelf, waiting for you to find him reading with Catherine. He is waiting for you to join them, because Heathcliff's been dead for years. They're stuck by the fire.

I was married, not for love but for the sake of plot, and my daughter looks just exactly like me in a way that can only happen in fiction. The trees changed on demand. Wuthering Heights lost its sunlight and the Grange stole it away in a truly unnatural sort of way. Because it is fiction, and that's how it works. I'm not angry.

The long dead, the tragic heroes, we don't get to ask for many things. And so I ask you just this once to remember that I was not so very beautiful. I was young, and I was stupid. I never really loved Heathcliff or Edgar or anyone but myself. I loved the sky sometimes. I wrote on scraps of paper and threw them into the fire. I was no heroine. I died from pneumonia and weakness.

One day, I will turn to you on a dark street night and pull off my hood. You won't recognize my features. I could scream at you, and you wouldn't believe I existed. You may not have read me, in which case, I would appear as only the faintest of noises on the barest edge of hearing. Unread books will do that to you. Fiction is cancer, and I will metastasize inside your chest. I will give you soul cancer. I am long dead, and nobody's heroine.