Yellowface

I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING. THIEF. PLAGIARIZER. AND PERHAPS, because all bad things must be racially motivated, Racist.

The truth is fluid. There is always another way to spin the story, another wrench to throw into the narrative.

Without Athena, who am I?

Give me your bruises and hurts, she told us, and I will return to you a diamond.

Blocking out the negativity, because when you’re a writer, all that matters is the story within.

who knew how mere words can become sentences can become a completed masterpiece, how that masterpiece can rocket you into a wholly unrecognizable world where you have everything—a world you wrote for yourself

I lie there for hours every night, awash in every cruel thing the internet has ever said about me. It’s cathartic, in a perverse way. I like to concentrate all the negativity, to take it all in at once. I take comfort in the fact that it could literally not get any worse than this.

I want the world to wait with bated breath for what I will say next. I want my words to last forever. I want to be eternal, permanent; when I’m gone, I want to leave behind a mountain of pages that scream, Juniper Song was here, and she told us what was on her mind.

Only I don’t know what it is I want to say anymore. I don’t know if I ever did. And I’m terrified that the only thing I’ll ever be remembered for, and the only method by which I can produce good work, is slipping on someone else’s skin.

“And then when I die, I won’t have left any mark on the world. It’ll be like I was never here at all.”

God, I miss my high school days, when I could flip my notebook open to an empty page and see possibility instead of frustration. When I took real pleasure in stringing words and sentences together just to see how they sounded. When writing was an act of sheer imagination, of taking myself away somewhere else, of creating something that was only for me.