Ladies and gentlemen! Come one, come all! Join us on the greatest show on Earth! Watch me completely mutilate myself for the enjoyment of yours truly! Step on up and experience a world of corrupt misanthropy and stunning feats of injustice!

-Metaphor of Me:

What was once a person, an actual being of life and intent, perished until the bare minimum was all that remained: my remains. Neat and clean-cut, spattered and greasy, a fuss over which side restrains myself for the day. Though, like my organs, restraint has all but rotten, my rotten ways now more present than ever, yet continue to live (well, not live really)  unnoticed. The marks of the life I once lived, childhood accidents, as abrasions up and down my legs, or at least, what were once legs. And as the tissue of my infantile experience slipped off of what was underneath, a new not-human was created, pale as bleach. My slender, bleached body, a mockery of effortlessness, uses its stone-like exterior to protect the spongy substance running within the compact. I make no sound, nothing, except for the crackle you barely hear when I foolishly try to speak. A good friend of mine, whose manipulating name will not be mentioned, is picking away at my flesh, the soft peach-pink that once warmed me, because flesh is too much worry. It says you don’t need flesh, flesh is mess, flesh is hazard. So I am no longer flesh. I am bones.

 

MORE ME

Here’s a brief explanation of me, Katherine Dianna Codd. What an elegant name, right? Well, until you get to the “Codd.” Blegh. It’s like the graceful queen of smelly fish. That’s me. Though if you know me, it’s more like the malevolent overlord of barbed wire. (Skipping over the pink, squishy, filling of course.) I’m a writer, or so I like to think. Inspired by the divinity of great artworks and artists, I drew an infatuation with this idea of devoting your life to serve as a medium between reality and art. And I must say, it is quite dark. Lovely and passionate, yet dark. As you know, my writing typically comes from a place of emotion and in explanation of the impact my morbid tones have on me I’ll quote Oscar Wilde and his idea that “to have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.”

Enough of that, so I’ll write about what it is I do other than rule over pungent smelling sea creatures.  I taught myself both piano and guitar and I hate to admit but I do, in fact, sing. I love anything gothic or horror and I play way too much “Legend of Zelda.” (Although, I recently got addicted to “Dark Souls” and will likely begin balding out of frustration as a result.) I have an almost obsessive love for animals, well, all except humans, and spent the first 15 years of my life determined to become a veterinarian. My 16th year, however, was filled with my teenage angst and I decided to become a biochemist so I could engineer a disease to kill all of humanity. I’m not a psychopath, I swear. Reading is another of my passions which brings me to my next consideration: reading and English Language Arts.  Within the last three or four years I have developed a strong interest in reading. Most describe reading as being pulled into another world, I, however, regard it as what it actually is: someone’s creation and a work of art. This mindset often teaches me more about the author than the characters. I credit this love for reading to one of the first short stories I ever wrote, “This is my Mask,” which ended up being quite ambiguous in nature and earned me a mark of 100% in grade 9 ELA. I loved playing around with the hidden meanings and symbolism, and the positive feedback for something I had created really set me in motion as a reader and writer.

Creativity, I would say is one of my greatest strengths, however structure and consistency are my weaknesses that largely outweigh my strengths. I’m always searching for a definite formula on which to structure my paragraphs and stanzas, though, writing is as un-formulaic as it comes. Therefore, it is left to your own devices and I’m far too critical of myself when it comes to that. My weakness of consistency really took a hold on me last semester and each time I tried to pick it back up the self-doubt only worsened with the increased pressure to the point where I was actually deleting some of my hard work or refusing to write altogether out of something as simple as insecurity. It seems recently that maybe I have fallen back into those same patterns. Just a single day where storms clotted the sky and a viscid, red syrup rained from the clouds, drenching me in agony’s blood. Just a single day, and promises and ambitions and hopes began to unravel beneath my feet. I have spun my self a spider’s web while being a fruit-fly and now I must live in this positive feedback loop, whereupon each day I must swallow a coal lump of guilt and disappointment, in turn, coiling me tighter in this spider’s silk.  Once it was but a single strand that tethered me to my sorrows, but I just kept winding and winding and when the spiders found me they tripled the pace. My encasement is secure and warm, but I know that if I stay here any longer they will eat me…

And I guess I die then.

 

What impresses me though, isn’t how deep I can dig a hole, it’s how meticulously I can crawl out of it.

Let’s see how good my ascending skills are then, shall we?