It was raining. Pouring, actually. It was raining so hard that it sounded as though the drops were threatening to slice right through the window. The torrential downpour seemed to be the sound track for that evening, which would then make it the soundtrack to my life.

Oh, goodness, did I just make that correlation? That my life all started with that one evening?

It's true to some effect. I guess that night is what started it all. It was the beginning of the snowball effect that made my life go out of control and pushed me off the deep end.

It's pretty funny, because I was always such a good kid. I got good grades, I had a lot of friends, and although I was a little lazy, I was pretty good at pulling my weight around the house. I knew my limits; granted, on occasion, I would go right up to the edge of the line, but I knew not to cross over. I was the freakin' Cinderella Story of the century. Kid growing up in some dysfunctional family and the racism in her small town, overcoming the challenges to raise herself properly and turned out alright in the end? Yeah, that was me. Cliché? Believe me, I know.

But I let it get to me. I let it rule me. I thought I could save the world, but I didn't know I had to save my life first. I thought too much and I didn't listen to myself when my conscious told me to stop. I couldn't. The adrenaline, the rush of euphoria that I felt at that moment, the beauty in the scene as I did it, and the beauty I created once I was finished, was all too much for me. I was addicted.
Drugs you're wondering? No, not drugs. Not cutting. Not drinking. Nothing of substance abuse, but I think I'm starting to ramble.

What I'm trying to say is this.
Hello, my name Yoora Elaine Dietrich. I'm of Korean and German dissent, I have a goldfish named Neville, and I'm a diagnosed serial killer.

It began as a childhood curiosity, I suppose. As a child, I lived in a, well, not so great neighborhood. There was one woman on the street, however, who tended to a meticulous garden. It surrounded her little porch in vibrant displays of colour and grandeur, completely at odds with the ramshackle appearance of her tiny home. She had flowers of all sorts; tall, willowy snap dragons, beautiful but deadly roses, sweet smelling gardenias and pansy plants that were all colours of the rainbow.

I lovingly referred to her little slice of paradise as the "Tropical Suburban Rainforest of Wicker Street," but perhaps the best thing about her vibrant garden was that every year it was home to a swarm of butterflies. It seemed as though all of the butterflies in the town flocked to her little corner, littering the blossoms with the flutter of motion and delicate wing patterns.

It would be an understatement to say I was fascinated. I was enthralled, mesmerized even, by the delicate bodies and forms of those little critters. I can remember sitting there for hours with my sketchbook, trying to capture the beauty and simplicity of nature's miniature masterpieces on my pad of paper. It was difficult, and instead of grasping the intricate detail that I was striving for, I ended up with a blob that sort of resembled a butterfly if you squinted hard enough. I was disappointed, and I would ponder at night what exactly I was doing wrong.

My conclusion? They were moving too fast. They danced through the air like dandelion seeds, carelessly at ease and with no mind to the fact that I was trying to jot down their likeness on paper. They needed to stay still. They needed to stop moving.

I guess I got my idea from the television. There was a program on about preserving butterflies in shadow boxes and I couldn't help but notice how…still they were. It would be easy to draw them now.

With the wonderful invention of Google, I was able to research how to do this and I was shocked to see how easy it was.

You see, the process was simple. First you caught the butterfly, put in the jar for a few days, and wait until they died. Then get a small piece of Styrofoam, larger than the butterfly, and pin the thorax of the butterfly to the Styrofoam, keeping in mind to remember to keep the wings flush to the Styrofoam. Once that was done you could pop in the freezer for a couple days to get the body to stay, and once you were finished just transfer the still butterfly to a shadowbox.

I decided to see if it worked, of course. And to my surprise, it did. Soon I was preserving butterflies left right and until my walls were filled with those little shadowboxes. The drawings I created were stunning, if I do say myself. I won a number of contests with my pieces; some with prize money that helped pay the bills, so my mother was happy. It was a good time in my life, all and all.

But I guess the darker side of human nature tends to creep up on you, and suddenly I wasn't happy with just drawing butterflies. It was time to move on and pursue something bigger, something grander. I needed a new spin on my old drawings. I wanted more.

So I strayed away from drawing butterflies and instead put my efforts into drawing the other little creatures in the neighborhood. Squirrels, rats, pigeons, crows. Things like that.

But again, I was faced with the same dilemma; those critters couldn't stay still. I knew I could hardly solve that problem by doing the same thing with them as I had done with the butterflies so I had to get creative. Eventually I got it, but it took a lot of trial and error.

First I just used a bird that one of the other neighborhood kid's had killed with a stone and kept it in my room to draw. The problem with this was the smell. By day two my room reeked of decaying animal corpse and rotting flesh. I tried opening the window, but that did nothing except had dope smoke and the smell of human urine into the mix. So I moved my endeavor outside into the little shed in the backyard where we kept all the tools and such that we never used. My mother is a single mom, my father having left us when I was very young, so she had no use for chainsaws and powerdrills that I was aware of.

That seemed to work for a bit. There were tiny vents in the ceiling to waft out the smell, though it didn't really matter because no one ventured into the shed anyway.

But again, the darker side of the human psych crept up on me, and I realized I wasn't satisfied with drawing such mundane creatures. I wanted to move on to something bigger and better, a real showstopper. I had the talent to draw exact likenesses; I just needed a willing model. Or unwilling, it never really mattered to me. I was already bored with the neighborhood creatures, however. But as I was burying the little corpse of my last subject, I noticed a lot of cats in the area searching for the remains of my other decomposing subjects in the yard.
The neighborhood's stray cat population dropped dramatically, but even that in the end was not good enough.

So I moved on to my ultimate achievement in my pursuit of perfect art, and her name was Morgan Drekoff.

I was enthralled by the way she was able to float by the social scene seemingly unnoticed by the people around her. She wasn't one to talk, and was content just listening to her iPod and hiding herself in the cocoon she called her hoodie. Up close, she had a rather delicate bone structure and a startling pair of sea-green eyes that for the life of me I was never able to mix my paints together to get. She had a smattering of rather peculiar little bumps across her face, acne from the left over stages of puberty, but it was nothing that I couldn't overlook while painting her.

For days I observed her, the way she moved and her funny little habits that made humans so adorable. The way she chewed on her pencil when she was anxious about a test or the way she'd check her phone to calculate how much time was left in class. I noticed how quick she packed up, generally first to leave the room to whatever class she had next. I only had her in two classes, Math and English. I contemplated talking to her a number of times, but I was always lost on what to say.

"Hello, may I draw you?" No, I was no Leonardio Di Caprio, and this wasn't the Titanic.
"Hi I'll draw you right now. For free." Uh, no. I wasn't selling girl scout cookies.
"I would like to impress your likeness upon a canvas and enter a contest, what do you say?" No, that's just…a little creepy.

At a loss for words and a little discouraged, I carried on my day just trying in vain to figure out a way to make her acquaintance. It was then that my opportunity had arrived.

The infamous lunch time was upon me; the high school archetype that was paramount for all high school relationships. It was the watering hole in which both predator and prey were able to lounge together in a moment of peace, clustered together in small sects about the lunch room and spilling into the outside courtyards. It was a time of unwinding from the first half of the school day and a time for preparation for the rest of it.

As I made my daily trek through kids trying to find someone to copy homework from and girls gossiping over silly things, I happened to find Morgan alone, as usual, fiddling with her iPod and nibbling on a sandwich. The lunch room was especially crowded that day for some reason, something about combining lunches due to a schedule change. Either way, it was the perfect opportunity to introduce myself.

I sat down next to her with the bowl of soup I had purchased for lunch. She gave me no acknowledgement so I shifted awkwardly next to her, coughing slightly under my breath until she looked up, startling me again with her eyes. She eyed me warily.

"What do you need?" she asked me.

I searched her eyes for a moment, noting no outward hostility although her words were hard and as cold as ice.

"Nothing," I murmured. "There are no other seats available."

To this day, I'm not exactly sure what I said wrong, but as I said those words she bristled. Right as I was about to ask her if she wouldn't mind modeling for me she said, "Oh, last choice was I? You people are all the same. My god," and with that, she got up and left.

It was then that I noticed how fickle people are, and their inability to just…stay still. I tried to figure out a way that I could keep her still long enough to draw her, when it dawned on me what I had to do.

Planning was always my favourite part.