notes: i think i needed to write this, even if it is a little personal.
but i really don't know if i should've posted it or not.

Eleven year old Erza, the girly girly girl. That's who she is. Tough and girly Erza wears pretty skirts and runs faster than anyone. Taller than a mountain, her breath puffs, ghostly fog, over their munchkin heads. Round face, bright hair. Erza: the kid with an overgrown shape, but definitely a kid kid. Inside, she's small, in the way every eleven-aged person is. She lives, blissfully, through 800 hours of school.

Being small is confusing, her mom says, with nightmares roaming the class pods, sharpening teeth on the playground. Feeding on bodies. Right now you're all character, Erza-darling. You're smart and funny. You're friends with a lot of boys. Since you're little, people still see you instead of the outsi—

"You mean I'm a baby."

Mom says, Darling I just meant that—

"I think I get it. Only babies are friends with boys. Not kissing, right? Not kissing or anything like that. And babies don't have bodies...just lumps. Right, mom? Am I just a…" But she can't figure out what noun fits there. Who am I, anyway? Girly girly, kid-Erza the baby? Something else?

Over summer, Erza spends an afternoon studying physical geometry. Because, she realizes, her body is all anyone can see of her. And she wasn't that aware of having one until now, which meant she didn't have one. Does this make sense? She glances in the mirror without ever looking…'cause...what did it matter, when you were fast and funny and eleven, what you looked like? But too much thinking changes things.

(Now I think it matters.)

She doesn't want to be a baby anymore.

If...people looking at her is all that she is, and she doesn't even know what they were seeing, then...then does she even know who she is? What if there's more to her than a face and elbows and legs—something inside?

Mom says, We're all just human in the end, Erza-darling. We see what we see…and that's an unchangeable, stuck-in-the-mud fact.

We are what they make of us. You should know. They'll critique you soon with what they got from you. I told you they only have one thing to go by.

So, Erza decides, logic dictates that her outside must be all of her: all her stuffness. All of Erza Scarlet just a border around a shell containing a lot of empty air.

This is her. Fastness coded into the lines of her legs. A short temper that must knot itself into her hair. Fears in the wet of her eyes, or in the back of her throat where it gets all thick and clotted when she's upset—turns out the quiddity of her is all skin. All surface area.

Or else the blood and organs and stuff that really really gross her out. (Ew. She's not even gonna get started on that trainwreck of thought.)

This, she thinks, is, in capital letters: A VERY BIG DEAL.

(but confusing, too.)

If you think about it that way, like your whole character is just a mass of Post-It notes stuck all a bone-filled, blood-filled casket, maybe...would you get scared? Erza is scared already.

Because problems, so momentous she can hardly understand, already rear their heads: She doesn't even know if she likes her husk yet. Too soon to judge. Too many changes to be made. Hair grows and bones shift and it's all very complicated to judge in one afternoon of thinking, or a lifetime of thinking, or a billion trillion years of thinking.

(it's too much, too much, there's some ideas too big to fit on someone so small)

Maybe she'll decide to never decide.