Katrina Flameño, age 14

California

I wrote this scene during the WriteGirl Fiction Workshop. It’s from a story I’m just starting from my currently unnamed main character’s point of view and represents the self vs. self image.

Headspace

My room is the realm of my visions. I find the plain, pale wooden walls quite bland. Thus, I scatter my sketches upon them, always wondering who my subject is.

I don’t have mirrors. They are too face-value for me. My bed squeals like an animal that knows it is simply prey in this world, and is ready to give up.

I don’t feel like tending too much to the broken china plates on the floor, or the clear cracked vase on my nightstand. The flowers that bloomed within lay rotting on the floor, giving back to what little nature is left in the space.

And yet, to refresh the environment, to make it “clean,” is to rid it of any soul. It would be too sterile, numb. A solitary confinement with no way to conjure artistic ideas, no way to feel safe in those cold bounds, and no way to recognize myself in there.

My essence speaks for itself. Or maybe I feel too much of nothing towards myself to bring my realm back to how it was in its old days of sunrays pouring through my window, now boarded up, and sketchbooks filled with endless things I saw from there.