Yellowface

Athena—a beautiful, Yale-educated, international, ambiguously queer woman of color—has been chosen by the Powers That Be. Meanwhile, I’m just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly—and no matter how hard I work, or how well I write, I’ll never be Athena Liu.

She’s unbelievable. She’s literally unbelievable

And this will become, in time, my story once again.

The futility of it all. Like Echo looking at Narcissus. Like Icarus, hurtling straight at the sun, just to feel its warmth on his skin.

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.

I want my books in stores all over the world.

Writing isn’t the whole world, Junie. And there’s plenty of careers that won’t give you such constant heartbreak. That’s all I’m saying.”

But writing is the whole world. How can I explain this to her? Stopping isn’t an option. I need to create. It is a physical urge, a craving, like breathing, like eating; when it’s going well, it’s better than sex, and when it’s not, I can’t take pleasure in anything else.

It was Dad who could always follow me wherever my imagination went. But we don’t talk about Dad.

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.

But they’ll remind me, whenever I need it, that writing didn’t used to be so miserable.