YOU GOTTA BE

There was a moment when she thought it might have been easier not to remember, not to know; there was a moment when she thought it was better to not question, to let the spirit of it move through the muscle and sinew of her body and allow it to focus on making her better, making her stronger without questioning who she had been—not with any degree of tenacity, at least.

And now she sat here, her eyes, resting against the headrest of the car in the yard, the endless grass of a place she had never been filled with people she had once known, people who had once loved the person she had once been.

Just a minute, she had said, she just needed a minute to gather her thoughts, a minute to put herself back together, to know who Carol Danvers was, who she had been. And so, she sat there with the warmth of the sun crawling midway along the blue skies and she closed her eyes and she tried to think about who she had been, listening to but not hearing the radio as it played song after song that she did not recognise.

'You gotta be bad, you gotta be bold, you gotta be wiser.'

When she had been a child, when her brother had been out, she had snuck into his room and gone through his things, pulling out the torn and disposed of comic books he kept stashed in piles under things of greater importance, sticking out of the trash can, stuffed into his desk.

She sat on the floor of his room, turned the pages over, studied them with intent and filled her head with dreams, stories of Earth's 'mightiest mortal,' of a little boy not too different from her, a little boy who became the perfect man, the ideal man, and she asked herself then what she would have done if she had been granted such a power, if she had met a wizard and spoke the name that would send her flying, that could give her flight.

'You gotta be hard, you gotta be tough, you gotta be stronger.'

It wasn't that she ever saw herself as a boy, it wasn't that she felt that she needed to be a boy to be better, but she knew that there were things that catered to boys, things that boys were allowed to be that she was not. She could not remember when she first understood that this was the way things were, whether it had been after the crash on the race course, her father screaming at her, the blood warm and sour, like pennies in her mouth, held between her teeth, or if it had been before, before her brother had been born, before she even had words to express it.

'You gotta be cool, you gotta be calm, you gotta stay together.'

She felt it in her fingertips, felt the warmth of it as it passed through her, and she tightened her hands into fists, lifting her head from the headrest and opening her eyes. She was still that girl, she still wanted the same things, to fight for those who could not fight, to fly higher, further, faster than anyone before her; to be a hero, to make a difference, to be better—and it was then, that she made her decision.

'All I know, all I know love will save the day.'