Six, seven, eight, nine,

Growing up I would find

an interest in writing my own stories.

And those stories,

cheap imitations of novels I had read,

featured characters unlike me.

 

For the novels that I had been raised with,

sweet and girly and easily read,

like my face when I lied to my mom about not eating cookies before dinner,

had protagonists who were small and cute and,

most importantly, white, with

features unlike me.

 

And so, when I approached the world of writing,

I entered it with an idea of an ideal type,

as I had never seen a character 

who was tall and gangly and dark,

who had permed hair that stuck in all directions of the wind

the way I stuck with my best friends,

friends that happened to be small and cute and white,

unlike me.

 

But as I grew older and sought out novels

by writers who wrote about people who were maybe

chubby or tan or bilingual, 

or anything,

my world itself opened up,

and I found that characters could be 

tall and gangly and dark

and that it was okay to write about people like

me.