I spend most of my year in self-effacement. Head down, hand up, a ghost who whispers answers to the lost. They take it; without a second thought, glance, judgement and leave the drooping girl in shades of grey to her notebook of lies. Poetry, prose, fiction, all of it is falsity straining towards enlightenment, in feeble attempts to discover itself, words stumbling into awkward rhymes hoping to somehow fall... into truth.
Then I do an about-face. Suddenly, out of nowhere, my hair falls into perfectly shaped golden locks around a painted face. A mask of melanin and mascara allow me to play a different part: one of laughter and physicality, one of reality and presence. The person I become in the summer months of heat, and sweat, and flesh believes that to be found, you must first endeavor to get beautiful, tragically lost.