Scarlett's Biography

   At the epitome of life and death where light and darkness clash together like waves in a raging sea, and the water is so black that it turns white and the air suffocates life, began me. On the twenty-fourth of January, nineteen-eighty-five, at some time around four pm you could hear my mother's scream down the hallway of Westmead Hospital, in Sydney.
I expect I cried, I hope I cried otherwise moments would have passed to which I was not inhaling, and therefore my sanity would have slowly been sucked away. Maybe that's the first thing God can take from you in your mortality, your sanity.

   Alas, I breathed.

   And there amongst my clumsy feet and passionate gaze I come to this point. I'll spare you the details of my tears and woes, highs and lows of school, as well as all the boys kisses and the work at the bank. They all submit to my plots, ideas, dreams. To the pages, but it's the pages themselves that make me.

   Society.

   The culture of colourful coldness and modern isolation. People have become books with no pages, and words with no meaning, which leads to the underground cult of the writers. The vampires who sneak into peoples lives and feed on their experiences, their stuttering philosophies, their lives. Entwined in through the grey and black of a monday morning we exist with coffee in hand and determination splattered out onto a white Word document. In the dry and brittle twigs of the tree of life we stretch out our limbs and allow the juices to flow, to force out the nature of natural night work and four am brilliance. Coffee, biscuits, scattered paper. Replaying the poetic injustice not served in your life, and allowing you to endulge. To hold and prey, an addiction effortless to swallow that stems from your own beginning.

   And so come I into the world from my mothers womb. I allow enlightenment of a plot to strike me so hard in the shower I nearly slip and break my nose, and cry so joyfully (and rather randomly) in a crowd of shoppers at my final ending for my current novel, and realise, in the movie theater as he kisses her passionately, why my supporting character must die.
   In this cult I survive the best. In ordering poison down my main character's throat my triumph is overwhelmingly contagious through the sleepless victims of word slinging.

    I could have written about the friends I once knew as a child, and how I met up with them again in high school. How as a young teenager I hated to feel like a woman and now I hate to feel unlike a woman. Mayhap I might have told you about how many bowls of ice cream I had today, or why I have a scar on my knee, and a scar on the sole of my foot from the same incident. But none of these things make Scarlett. It is this, what I'm capable of. This is what has been slotted into number one position.

   When God sat me down and said,
   "Scarlett, what is it you want to do when I send you down for another round?"
   I looked contemplatively at the choices. It was the pen that caught my eye; as I reached for it my fingers tingled. They itched. I'd never loose that feeling if a pen was not in my hand. I looked to God. I was not asking, I was insisting.
   "Very well," he smiled. That cocky smile.

   And there I came to be.