I was just 13 years old when Vincent Van Gogh took me out to a wheat field and shot me in the chest. He said I'll let you in on the easy way out because eating yellow paint just doesn't help but god, doesn't it sound poetic? He said he craved ***** things in a letter to his brother but when the paint didn't make his art any better he used bullets and blood instead.

I was just 16 when Sylvia Plath opened up the oven for me. My snow boots turned to puddles and the smell of cookies muddled with the gas filling up my head. She said putting words to paper just doesn't hash it and a poets mind is nothing but ashes so better to let the thoughts burn.

I was only 18 when Virginia Woolf tied stones to my hips and led me adrift into open waters. Gasping while my hands struggled to stay above the waves she told me that this was the only way and that stories were just stories. She could write a million of them but never escape the loneliness of being unable to evaporate inside the pages.

I was 21 years old when Ms Monroe told me it was as easy as falling asleep and swallowing some seeds that would feed and feed until they felt like yellow paint. Easy down the throat like the men that she'd known who now tear at my curls. She said wanting to be loved comes at a price that money just can't buy and pills will always be cheaper.

I am 25 years old and have carried their woes down my arms and legs like Marley's chains. All the gun shots and flame rots and drowning spells and yellow pills have beckoned me with promises of a happy ending. They convince me that all artist's lives end the same but I know that they don't have to. So—here I still stand, clutching their art in my hands, braving a world that they were too good for.