There are certain things, I’m discovering, that if you cut them up the right way, can always be put together again. Like humans. And, I’m discovering, emotions. Also oranges. There are others, however, that can’t be reconstructed. My theory is that these weren’t made well in the first place.

Of course, blenders, incinerators, and steam-rollers are a different story…or, at least, they give the story a different ending. But it seems to me that if you cut up true love, hell, even if you liquefy true love, it’s always possible to put it back together again. Like a starfish. Not like Humpty-Dumpty.

There are certain people, places, and things (I suppose just nouns in general) that I will always be in love with in an alternate universe, or maybe just on masochistic days in this one. There are songs I will always come back to, there are expressions I will always associate with one person, there are foods that I swear, despite alleged taste-bud-evolution (more like degeneration) I will always hate. For the most part, people don’t change much. Only waistlines…and hairlines.

We usually think of ourselves as blank canvases, with no predictable habits or personality traits or discernible accent. We’re just…US. Me. Everyone else is a character, with a name and that particular way of eating grapes. We, the individuals, just react to these grape-peelers.

photo by Jon Chiang

But in reality, I’m Bronwyn. I like music and poetry and owls. I read a lot of serious looking books and a lot of Shitty-Irish-Chick-Lit (a genre all unto itself, in my estimation). I collect albums and I hate boy-short underwear. I am twenty years old, I just got what I’ve always referred to as “Creative Writing Bangs,” and I do a particularly good velociraptor impression. I’m also a lot of things that I will never know that people say about me. Most of them are probably true.

So: this is how I’ve chosen to begin to present myself to you, the masses of faces bathed in blue light from computer screens that I will very likely never meet. This is the character I’m putting forward.

Who are you?