INDIANA STERLING, DISTRICT 8

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

Name: INDIANA STERLING
Age: SIXTEEN
Gender: Male
District/Area: District 8
Appearance:

( x x x x )

Personality:

History:

Codeword: OH DERE.
Comments/Other:

This lil boi is from Lalia's Library Plot, and is playing the part of Stream of Consciousness style of writing.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

“OUR CONSCIENCES”
Are always so much heavier than our egos.

AGE . Sixteen.
GENDER . Male.
LOCATION . District Eight.
JOB . -.
SEXUALITY . It's complicated.
TALKING . 838B8E
DOING . 9D6860
DEEP THOUGHT . 5A524F
HEARING . F2BB9C
OTHER . 244B4A

“I SET MY EXPECTATIONS HIGH"
So nothing ever comes out right.

"I TRIED TO SHED MY SKIN
TO RID MYSELF OF SCARS
BUT THEY WERE CARVED INTO MY BONES TOO .

To look at me is to see a girl, and I get that. What I hate is the fact that when they see me, all they see is her and I've sped away like so many particles into dust and rot and I'm dead I died so long ago now that I wonder if I was ever really living. Is a rose still a rose by any other name because I don't feel like a rose, I feel like a jagged piece of paper that's been crumbled into a ball and tossed into a basket to rest with the rest like me but what am I like? There aren't a lot of people like me out there, not a lot of boys that look like I do with my clear clear pale pale skin (my older brother once called me snow white to jab at me) so I unbecame snow white and became someone else. I dipped my hair into a vat of bleach to hide the dark storm of hair upon my head and we all know that snow white had dark hair and light skin with the reddest lips so I changed my hair to white and tried to colour my skin to dark but my mother took the felt pen away when i only had one hand finished.

My hair is long now and tickles my neck and ears because my mother hasn't been around to cut it for one two three years now and i very much miss her but she isn't coming back. They took her tongue out of her face (I watched as they ripped it out and her eyes bulged and there was wet on her cheeks and on my cheeks but the man simply looked blank and there was blood on the carpet blood on my mother blood on me spattered like flowers across my cheekbone then they took her and not me so) It's blonde blonde blonde, the colour of faded wheat, and matches the lightest silk so that's what i drape around my neck too so maybe i can just fade away and drown of heat like wheat in the field too. Once I stood in a wheat field for hours and my mother called for me but I was short and the wheat was tall and she never found me there, she gave up on me being in the wheat field but I didn't and looked for myself for three four five hours more.

I'm tall like a beanpole now because puberty hit me like a train is what my brother says and so now i'm not as tall as the wheat but getting there. (I'm not tall for boys I'm just tall for girls but I'm a boy? I'm a girl? I get confused sorry) i think that maybe if i keep on growing one day I'll touch the moon, holding it by my fingertips like a basketball in my brother's hand and i'll say hello to the man in the moon but he won't reply because there's no one up there and my brother said it isn't made of cheese because that's stupid. he says a lot of things are stupid and I don't get that because if there are more stupid things than smart things than how can we both be smart i think he's stupid. my teacher says that smart people are usually quieter than dumb people and i barely talk at all but my brother can yak your ear off if you let him. sorry for talking about my brother so much i know i'm supposed to tell you about me but brothers are important to talk about because they're apart of my identity and i would not be me without my brother i mean my hair would still be dark, not almost white like it is now.

The problem doesn't stop at my hair and my height because i have a very girlish face, according to my brother. It's angular and small and heart shaped and i have cheekbones but not and i wish i had sharper cheekbones because then maybe i would look more manly instead of just girlish. There's nothing wrong with girlish if you're a girl but I'm a boy, I know I don't have boobs and i have all of my man parts there so i must be a boy sometimes it gets confusing. It doesn't help I guess that I like to wear shadows and lines on my eyes to accentuate the dark dark colour of them. I'm not beautifully blue eyed, I have boring dark eyes with nothing in them so dark that you can barely tell the pupil from the iris and i wish i had beautiful eyes but i don't. My mother said that my body took the rest of the beauty and hoarded it. I like to wear girly things so I don't really help myself there but I'm pretty sure that I'm a guy, at least that's what they tell me.

I'm very careful with my appearance because the girls at school look at you funny if you don't try and I have to try because i am a girl at first glance. So i work at my hair with a curler or straighten it with a flat iron and i carefully choose my outfit now that i have my mother's wardrobe as well to work with it's even easier, and better is that sometimes her scent is still on the clothing so when i miss her i can tuck my nose into her shirt and miss her more clearly and her scent is flowers and rain and spring and mothers and i miss her. sometimes i perfect it so well that people mistake me for a girl and it doesn't help that i'm a hairless rodent with long, skinny legs and my body defies the idea that it should be male except for the muscle on my arms. I don't mind being mistaken for a girl because sometimes i bring it on myself but my name doesn't help with that either because indiana could be both couldn't it? Especially when people simply call me indy because that sounds girly too but my brother said if you link anything to me it will be sprayed with estrogen (I think he means to cut me open and find my extra estrogen and flush it down the toilet.)

when i sit still and still myself and still the air around me i look like a statue and my expression is so soft and serious that people think i'm broken but i might not be if i smile because when i smile it's like clouds splitting and the sky opening and i never meant to be sad but sometimes i can't help it because smiles don't bring happiness they bring tears and my nails pick at the skin underneath my other nails and i tear skin away in strips and i don't mean too so i cover up the blood underneath with art on my nails that makes my brother shake his head and the girls at school flock around my hands to make appreciative sounds and flirt at me but sometimes i want to be a boy and i wear my brother's jersey's and slip on a pair of skinnys. I pull my hair up into a careless pony tail and forget to wear make-up but it doesn't help anything because I'm still pretty i look like a girl wearing her brother's clothes but i'm a he and i want to be a he but i'll never have a wife and two point five kids with a white picket fence because i'm too beautiful to do anything but sew and girls want someone taller than them so they can fit snug under their chin and manly and i'm not any of that.

when my mother died my brother and i got matching tattoos, so one two three years ago now and the tattoo is wrapped around my rib cage and it is simply a feather like from an angel wing but it's losing little feathers off the feather like the strands aren't strands but other feathers and it says 'we'll lose our feathers' but i didn't know we could fly in the first place. it hurt and the needle pierced my skin and i cried but my brother told me not to be a baby so i didn't cry again and i haven't cried since because if i cry about stupid things like pricking my finger with a needle it will mean that the pain of my finger being pricked is equal to the pain of watching my mother be dragged away with no tongue and i don't think it is so i don't cry and i let myself feel cold by shutting off for a few minutes and not smiling and being alone and i miss her everyday.

“I'VE GOT MY HEAVY HEART TO HOLD ME DOWN”
Once it falls apart my head's in the clouds.

"THIS IS NOT DANGER," SAID HE, "IT IS INEVITABLE DESTRUCTION" .

I'm not one hundred percent sure if I'm a girl in a guy's body, or a guy in a body with guy parts that got confused and was halfway done being formed into a girl then lost the map and had to go on what it knew. Either way, i like girls the way that a guy likes girls and thinks about kissing them underneath an apple tree with a heart carved into the oak and initials -except sometimes when i'm thinking about it and daydreaming i get confused because i think i'm the girl for a second and my head is fitting snug under someone's chin- either way, everything is so messed up in my brain that my brother doesn't ever know what to do with me either. he calls me a 'he' but my mother called me 'she' so who's right in the end? They used to argue long into the night about what i was and they never came to a conclusion.

I never did either so i sort of just go with it and let the loopholes of humanity be my doorways, there's always a way around questions and I'm good at finding them. If I can't find them then I just don't say anything until they go away. that's how i tend to deal with most things actually i don't address the problem like my brother does, staring it straight in the face, i like to edge around it until i find a comfortable enough position to stretch my legs around the big pink elephant in the room and i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing because me and the elephant get to know each other pretty well that way and hey maybe the elephant isn't so bad after all, maybe it was simply misunderstood (I can understand that because i'm misunderstood a lot too and if there's one thing i know misery is better alone but i'd be willing to share my sadness with an elephant of a problem just to have something different to do)

I'm quiet and i don't say much unless i know you but i don't think that makes me shy because i am not shy i just don't say a lot and that's a common misconception. Just because i don't spout off words every second of the day it doesn't make me shy i think it makes me less shy. silences wouldn't be so awkward if people didn't call them that, silences will get out of puberty soon, big hands and big feet that trip over nothing too much and break sentences with their stilted sounds. Maybe those that speak a mile a minute would get along with silences better if they didn't talk over them and would just taste them in the air and sit in friendship because silences can be goddamned beautiful if you let them. Ah, but maybe that's why I'm weird because words are terrifyingly huge and the right ones never come along fast and people toss them out of their mouths like garbage. I like to choose mine thanks, to pick them out from a shop window to save for rainy days when there is nothing between us but two mugs of tea and a blanket.

I'm not very good at the lime light, i tend to run from it, preferably far and away but sometimes people try and stick me there. i tend to not be where i'm supposed to though, and have been pretty unreliable. i don't mean to be it just happens and i'm sorry i don't mean to be who i am but i get scared easily and i'm trying to be braver but it's not easy being green. i've been like this for a long time now too, it didn't just happen miraculously. when i was eight and my father left is when i got weird as my brother so delicately likes to put it. My mother used to blame herself for not having a good male figure in the house but i think out of anyone, it was my fault, and he used to tell me that every single night and when someone tells you the same thing again and again you start to believe it. it doesn't really help that i'm pretty sure my brother blames me for it too because when he left he said i was a freak, and no son of his. Who's son am i?

when I was little i wanted to be the son of alexander the great because he conquered many lands and he probably had long hair but he was still a male and nobody ever stood up to him because he'd squash them with his horse but my father never was great and his name was manhatten and i think that was a place made of bricks, bricks are cold and red and angry stones all piled up in a wall and put under so much strain it makes sense that he was never really happy with those bottle thick glasses and the black tie he always wore and maybe he had a closet full because they never got dirty and just once i'd have liked to make his tie dirty but he always took it off before and put it back on after he was finished with me but he never seemed finished with me and to this day i still expect to see his tie on the table and then i'll know he's waiting for me and maybe then i can breathe but until then i wait in silent fear.

Silence is my forte and while i slip into it easily enough it's getting harder to find the way out of it until i lean against a wall and no one really sees me anymore but they call me edgy and cool and i just might disappear altogether so i hide behind the lens of a camera, the one that my mother used to take so much care of and develop photos in a back room of the library, deep in the basement in the dark where no one really goes because darkness is scary but not to me i've always wrapped it around me like a cloak because in the darkness you can hide and i think sometimes people forget that. I capture people when they stop looking like pictures of who they want to be and for only a moment remember they are not always happy in frames and soak them in solvents to hang from strings that criss-cross the room like a yarn maze i once went through as a child trying to find my way out and i couldn't so i cried and i cry a lot and i don't mean to but sometimes it's hard not to.

“SO I'M TAKING EVERY CHANCE I GOT”
Like the man I know I'm not.

"SILENCE IS THE MOST POWERFUL SCREAM .

I don't really remember much about being really little other than my mother's floppy big hat that she used to wear when we went to the woods to deliberately live like thoreau did and my father said it was important to do because life was so uncertain nowadays but when i was born my brother was two and my mother said she never wanted another kid after that because it was so hard on her body and being pregnant was hard and she couldn't work as well but my dad said that all she had to do was sew and my mother would smile softly and drop it not wanting to argue but i think she should have argued if she wasn't happy but she never did, at least my brother said when i was just little things were okay it was when i got older that things started happening all wrong but until i turned four i remember the sun and how warm it was and my cheek resting against my mother's back when she carried me in a sling and the smell of the air on our tongues when we lay down in the grass and stared at the stars.

One day my mother's hat went flying away in the wind, the hot sun being too much for her, she sent my brother to go and get it, and he was only three, so he and my dad ran after that, my brother on his shoulders, and me with my mother, waiting silently for the return of her hat. She trusted them to give it back to her, and eventually they did but it had been dropped in a pond and my father's pants were all wet and my brother was laughing when they returned.

Until I turned four and my unnatural prettiness started to get noticed things were great, according to my brother, and everyone was happy. There was a picket fence and we had a cat for a while but he ran away and my brother locked his door when he was only five and threw paper balls at the wall until there was a pile so big that my dad got mad when he saw because it was a waste and i think my brother wanted to drown himself in paper but he never cried he just got mad, the opposite of me because no matter what I'm feeling my first response is to cry. When I turned four it was the beginning of the end because one day i was playing dress up with my brother and i slipped into my mother's heels that went cup, cup, cup against the wood floors and slipped under my mother's big floppy hat, and i felt safe from the sun under there, and knew why the moon hid at day under it's big floppy hat.

When my father got home and he saw me in my mother's clothes he stared for a long time and then he got silent and he took the hat off my head with one hand, and ruffled my hair like the wind with his other, i thought he was going to be mad so i hid underneath my bangs and after that we stopped playing dress-up. After that is when my father started to get angry and stern and he began to wear his glasses and wear his black ties and my mother started to get sadder and there was more shouting at night and my brother and i would sit on the stairs and listen to the sounds of voices shattering and hearts breaking coming from the kitchen until one night my brother couldn't bare it anymore and he built a fort inside his room and we cut out paper stars and hung them and we stayed there all night once just staring at the stars and how far away they were even though we'd hung them ourselves.

One night it was quiet because my father was out late, working my mom said, but when he came home he smelled funny and walked like a monster and my brother said that he was just sick and i thought he was just sick too so when he came into my room that first time, i let him so he could get better but he didn't come into my bed to get better he came into my bed to feel better about himself but the next day he never did he was only angrier because he said i made him into someone he'd never been before and the change was too scary for him and i didn't know why it was my fault but it was and i came to accept that and sometimes i never knew what to do so i'd do nothing and just let him hold me as long as he liked because that's what a good son does but then he began to hold me like he did mother and that got confusing but i didn't know what to do so I did nothing.

i came to start hating my dad which was confusing because a son is supposed to love his father, my brother loved my dad and when he'd get home he'd tackle him from the stairs but i never did, I'd just stick my faces between the bars of the banister and watch and my mother started to say that i was a really quiet kid and maybe there was something wrong but my dad always defended me and said that i was perfectly normal. He always called me his little boy even when i wanted to wear a dress but he liked when i wore dresses and some days he'd come home with a bit of silk to make a dress, and my mother would teach me to sew and we'd sit together and when i pricked my finger she'd kiss it. By the time i was seven, i was helping my mother everyday with her sewing and every night i helped my father feel better, i was a full time worker.

I don't think my mother and brother ever knew about dad and me.

When I was eight, he left, and i don't remember why, i just remember that i cried for days and days and my mother thought there was something wrong with me and my brother blamed me for his leaving even though he didn't know why he was blaming me, he just knew because he saw dad go into my room and he thought i was stealing him from him, and i was the second not the first and it wasn't fair, but i never wanted him i would have gladly given him back but i couldn't say anything i didn't know what to say i couldn't even scream because i didn't know what to scream for.

After that my mother sent me to a man who kept asking me how i was feeling every time i saw him, once every Tuesday for a half hour because that was all my mother could afford, but i never said a word to him because i didn't know him and there was nothing wrong with me and once he asked me why i wore dresses all the time and i told him because my father liked it and he never said a lot after that but i think he felt sorry for me and i hate that, the pity in their eyes so i stopped going and my mother stopped trying to send me. When I was thirteen it didn't matter what she wanted anymore anyway because she got a promotion in the factory she worked in for fifteen years and one lady was so jealous that she accused my mother of trying to rebel against the capitol and to nip it in the bud they came into my kitchen in the middle of lunch and they stole the tongue right out of her and dragged her away and i haven't seen her since.

I discovered her camera when i was fourteen and taught myself how to use it, only as a hobby. I go to school and my brother dropped out so that he could support us but when i tried to drop out to sew full time he said i couldn't that i had to be the smart one so i go to school and i cook dinner and keep the house clean and when my brother gets home from an unbearably long day i clean the dishes too. At school they mock me and call me a housewife but i'm not bothered by it really, because i want to help. I started taking photos of people because i wanted to be able to capture their sadness and hang it on the wall for all to see but i only keep the photos in the basement room of the Library. Andorra Konstantine brought me down there one day during the study hour at the Library and she gave me the room and said i could have it if i let her go in whenever she wanted and she does go in whenever she wants and she sees the photos i take and sometimes she puts the one she doesn't like down at the bottom but they're always of her.

ANYTHING ELSE ?



OUT OF CHARACTER .

FACE CLAIM .

CHOI MIN KI • INDIANA STERLING

OTHER CHARACTERS ?

Click!

I, ELEGANT .

am firing myself, don't worry.

Thank-you if you made your way through this entire bio, for reading it and baring with me as I try this new style of writing.

CODEWORD . odair

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

wow, so I guess boy is done. Thanks if you made it through him.

[Rosetta]

Very unique!!! Accepted!

[/color][/blockquote]