A collection of things Erika wrote in an untitled google docs page over the course of 3 weeks

[Yonagoda]

You laid your fingers on the junction where my jawline met my neck.

The pad of the thumb was soft.

Your nails dig in and I gasp, sharp finger caught between the muscle and bone.

You dig deeper.

I can't stop.

[Yonagoda]

The way people described jealousy always felt unreal. It's impossible to fathom how other people hated someone while wanting, in some essence, to be them. It's always a sort of twisted admiration for me.

I think jealousy is another way to say love- that kind that you can't control, that makes you do horrible things. I want to be them. I want to replace them. I want them to never stop but I want myself to stop looking at them.

I want to carve a hole into them, and nest in there, root myself into their dilapidated organs and stay there, feel their skin surround me. Feel their warmth, the hollow of their ribcage enveloping me. Wearing their face.

(That's metaphorical, by the way.)

It's such an ugly way to say it. It's also the only way that I know how to say it. Imitation is flattery, isn't it? How far can I take?

[Yonagoda]

note to self:

-thinking critically 6-1 to 6-3 (friday) (finished: 6-1
-study for math test (thursday)
-AP art study (friday)

[Yonagoda]

A girl made of not quite flesh stabs an impliment into her leg. No blood flows. She inserts her finger into the gaping wound and stroked the inside of her artificial skin, stringing across a wire where an artery belonged. She groans.

(note to self don't make this sexual at all dont wanna get banned)

(note to self youre being too edgy)

[Yonagoda]

Finish draft for minotaur forgiving theseus cover by monday

Potential titles?

[Yonagoda]

I want to be a cow grazing upon the Californian hills. Oblivious and existing only to live and to die, the very concept of my eventual fate incomprehensible to my stupid little brain. My whole world would be the grassy fields and the farmer, the clouds above me and the ground below and the telephone wires strung over my head. I’ll be hearded to the slaughterhouse full and content. I’ve thought a lot about the love that the cow has for the butcher. For the ranchers fattening them up. Do they know how much of our love for them is for their hide and flesh?

[Yonagoda]

I’d love to feel truly alive one day. I’d love to be able to feel something other than this pit.

[Yonagoda]

There was a two-headed doe born in the little ranch, where I bought tomatoes from after the fifteen mile drive. She had four big eyes on her misshapen head. They think her mother left her there to die. I fed her with a gentle hand and she looked at me as if I were twice as beautiful.

[Yonagoda]

“If you want to start a storm, I’ll be the fucking eye”

[Yonagoda]

Humanity itself is a concept that is impossible to define, even without the realm of the fantasy.

Millions of years later, we will be unrecognizable and ruined, rambling within the dilapidated remains of our own creations, all knowledge passed down through shaky hands, information spilled like sand though fingers, facts viewed through lenses cracked through time and eyes that no longer see our reflections.

Imagine, then, one hypothetical scenario- and, this is without the proper scientific knowledge that I recognize is needed to make predictions that are believable and reliable in any ways (this is a project for entertainment, after all) where the existing divides of both social class and gender, of the roles we perform in daily life, are magnified and modified in a way where it becomes an irreversible part of our DNA, where jobs are no longer a matter of money, but of our biology, the same way that beehives and anthills assign soldiers and queens.

What, then, will become of those that fill the cracks, that aspire to recreate social mobility? What will become of our minds and flesh as we become utterly subsumed in this act?

The most obvious will be physical indicators of our roles in society- the same way that a careful eye is able to determine the difference between queen, drone, and worker bees. The very basis of who we are will remain- bipedal apes, with our two eyes and two ears and retractable thumbs. We will keep our voice, and those that are lucky will keep the intellect that humans of the past once prided themselves on.

(HNGGG this is EXHAUSTING I'll get to it later)

[Yonagoda]

You are buried underneath the pavement your classmates once walked on.

You are the parking lot and the night-lamps shining below the street.

You are what other people cross through to get to the mountain ranges and the forests and the parks.

[Yonagoda]

What's the difference between a man and a machine? Between the electricity flowing through our neurons and the charge flying through their wires?

Nothing. We are both replaceable.

[Yonagoda]

Within fifteen years my house will be sold, barren, or crushed to the ground. The ants living beneath the floorboard will remain.

[Yonagoda]

She never gave her own skin the love she gave for others. She didn't touch others the way she touched herself. She picks at her scabs and grinds her nails between her teeth. When it's other people's bodies she barely hovers her hands over the shoulders, like she was terrified that the moment her hand was laid she'd sink her nails in and scratch herself into the groove of their skin. She never hugged anyone as much as she was a recipient of an embrace, when people put their arms around her she never wrapped her's back.

[Yonagoda]

It sort of occurred to her one day that she never had any childhood friends. It felt like she always had a chunk missing. No sleepovers and hushed rumors and inside jokes and nicknames and excited whisperings on the school bus, just a girl who always sat by herself.

Were sleepovers even a thing? She wasn't sure. Maybe they were just a thing made up by movies.

There were so many things she never experienced. Intricate social webs that she never knew existed, much less navigated through.