Letter

My homework for my Fiction Writing class was to write my professor a letter introducing myself...

Rachel, 

            My name is Cassandra. Most people pronounce it a different way than I do, so I try to understand when I’m called the wrong name. Almost everyone outside of the professional world calls me Cassie, which I find to be lightweight and reflecting of my playful nature. However, as a writer, I prefer Cassandra. I even use the pen name Cassandra Fox (Fox is my grandmother’s maiden name and the fox is my spirit animal). 

            I’m hunched in the dark, losing my mind to the painstakingly mournful music that permeates my room. My purple and yellow socks usually stand full mast at my calves, but have fallen into wrinkled heaps at my ankles. This is me. This is me surrendering to my midnight illness, the plague of this young fox’s mind. Reaching down to grab my bright pink and orange flower cup, I take a long gulp of something other than water. Foxes are known for being cunning, and I have begun to believe that their ability to achieve through deceit is based upon their complete awareness of the world.  

           Sometimes I stare wide-eyed at the world and wonder if it is my awareness that makes me so vulnerable to my mind when I am alone in the inky depths of darkness. 

            The cunning fox will never allow you to know how she feels, so she will hide her vulnerabilities at all costs. However, her awareness of the world means that she is also aware of herself and, because of this, she is aware that hiding her wounds will only make them hurt more. She must first allow them to heal in the forest a breeze. As every fox knows, you can trust no one but yourself. She finds her breath of relief in writing, because she is opening up to a different world, one where open wounds in the forest are not her downfall. Once she worried who might come across the words she so carefully chewed, but the fox realized that with words, all things are possible. 

             With words, the cunning fox stands in a bipedal manner, her two long legs stretching for miles beneath her strong torso. This is her mask. The fox grows from forest floor to busy street, stopping only to run her fingers through her long hair. The red hair and green eyes are all that are left of her past life, but now the cunning fox is free to achieve her desires through deceit. Now she can be vulnerable, because she is being someone else. In the shadows she writes out her worries and pains, waiting till the morning when the sun will shine again. 

            As a fox, she is more than capable of surviving on her own in the wild, but as a human being, there is nothing that hurts her more than being alone with her thoughts at night. And so she writes. 

 Cassandra