Soooooo here's the deal. I'm trying to be a good person and do this but I'm an awful person and I can't do shit. So, don't get super invested in this story. Just a warning. -Loving author

So this is edit number two to the second version of chapter one. That means if you read this back when it was first created then it was a completely different chapter. Just so you know. Also thank you to the two lovely souls who commented to tell me that this chapter was a mess of code. Y'all are wonderful.
-Loving Author ( Edit: Nov. 11 2018)

Dear friends,

I want to write you a love story. Something both moving and unable to be moved from your brain. I want to write a story that brings you to tears and rage in equal measure. The love of a sister to her sister and of the earth to a fire. The love of a daughter to her mother and a gypsy to the road. Of a child to a stranger and the ever-changing unknown ocean deep. The love of two enemies whose only comfort was each other's hate.

It's not a good story. Not even a nice one. But it will be a defining one.

I want to pull this story from myself like a soothsayer would the knuckle bones of a dragon, and I want this story to pull myself from it like the uncertain future made tangible from the ash and ember of a sage's fire. I want to bleed into you through this story entail you love me and desire me like an alcoholic their drink. Through this story, I intend to be known as the rooted wings of a withered tree.

My friends, I am me stuck both at the end, beginning, and in-between. I am a story read and re-read a thousand times that still has an ungrasped plot, unspeakable name, and an unforgettable ending. I am the average and the extraordinary, the hunter and the weaver. I am pure possibility and I am terrified by my own self and the mistakes I will undoubtedly make, almost as much as the victories I create and what they will undoubtedly mean.

I am a little girl walking in a pitch-black hall to the safe glow of my parent's doorway, and all I can do is sharpen my smile narrow my eyes and ask if it was any wonder that I fell down the stairs.

(Please don't ask if it was intentional. After all, if I am proposed no uncertainties then how will I know to mistake the facts?)

I only wanted to fly.

However,

This story cannot exist. Cannot be written in glistening blue, black, or red ink, cannot be keyed into times new roman size 12, cannot even be flung from the ever-willing thought of a singing bard.

After all, how can I edit, erase, rewrite my past? I cannot be edited, erased, or re-written from my soul/body. Even if tomorrow I lost my memory/sanity/life, it would still peek around the corner of my brain and body like a child unwilling to stand before an impatient parent. Through my scars and stains, I might read my past as though it were blue, black, or red ink sketched on my very skin, and even if I closed my eyes to it I would only reveal the writing on my eyelids.

No, my friends, this story can only be read through braille. Fingers moving over my own scared letters for no spoken one could be trusted to accurately define the heights of my elation or debts of my melancholy, no single song could tell of the color and monotone of the gaps and bridges of my own sense of person forged from the hands of my broken-bottle family. It's a wonder I made it out uncut, or maybe that's the blood loss talking.

Please remember I'm a girl walking in the dark and as such I cannot tell if this warm seeping liquid is my own life blood or the miasma of my imagination. I'm afraid you will have to judge for yourself as you read my Times New Roman blasphemy.

I think it is therefore ironic that this unwritable unreadable imposable story will have no true muse. I pulled this particular write from my ass instead of listening to a sad, sad song and feeling sorry for myself. And so, I have made the dull, sparkly, sharp, silicon story as fake as the person writing it.

I suppose that's why I call it a love story. I am so despite for love and acknowledgment that I use second-hand smoke and broken bottle glass to pull wool over your eyes and cast an illusion of a human being and not this rotting old thing that was left behind in its skin. Because if you pull back the flowers and partake of the fruit the only thing left is the rotten wood and flamed-kissed roots. Oh yes, no amount of good dark warm watery underground things could have healed that so we just picked up a shovel and buried that deep. The only problem is how deep a rotten Rowen must be buried for it to stay down, because my family tree keeps appearing, pushing up from the ground like the evil undead intending to eat my air head and all the dreams that live within. Can you blame me for running?

But, well, none of this is real to begin with, so I guess that's ok. It would be silly for me to write a real story about a fake life. As silly as unmatched socks or a little girl falling down the stairs. After all, those socks all came from the same package and the little girl should have had wings enough to fly.