Never (Who I am)

I, too, am a deviant. You know how some people were born in the wrong body? I was born in the wrong body too. Not a big problem like gender or race or even age – just quantity. I don’t think there’s enough of me, but I don’t mean that in a self-congratulating sort of way. I hate other people like me and avoid small, bright, loud women at all costs. I mean I need more of me to use, more time awake, more height, more mass, more time. I also believe there was an alternative side of my personality at some pre-conscious point of my existence. I believe I am a miniature, a smaller version of the whole. The whole is the two of us, me and the other thing I’m a part of. This isn’t a codepency issue – this is a preservation instinct. Something, hopefully someone, is out there.

It goes without saying then that I’m a sucker for marvelous thoughts. I never lived in the ghetto, I lived in a castle where I was a mermaid princess and I was going to swim to the surface and marry a white boy. I was never a middle-schooler, I was an alien from Saturn’s largest moon Titan, who’d come to earth to choose a partner in crime. I’m not a college-girl, I’m a writer who suffers penury because the grown-ups don’t know. And if something can’t be marvelous to me it doesn’t matter anymore; it can go away. Reality doesn’t draw boundaries for me. If you tried to lock me up anywhere I’d just do the same thing over and over, distort my mind until I escaped. No walls, no bars. I live somewhere else.

Reality is, I’m a senior at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. I live in an apartment on the edge of campus, a single apartment with a great view and large kitchen. I am majoring in English Literature with an intent on Creative Writing. I play the piano on my free time and spend extra money on contemporary literary fiction. I have blue hair.

I like people who sing famous melodies with new lyrics. This is what I sound like, in case you ever have to recognize me by my voice alone.

You can contact me at olivad@reed.edu