Disclaimer.

My name is Larissa. I am seventeen going on eighteen, though lately I feel like I am seventeen going on twenty-five. I go by a pen name for most things because people can't even pronounce my last name, never mind spell or remember it. It also gives me a sense of identity. When I am under the guise of Locke, I am a certain person. If I am Augustine, I am another. If I am Maria Van Gogh, I am yet another. I am not crazy. They are names for my moods, I suppose. I am disconnected from a lot of things right now and am catching bits of actual life in snatches. (Maybe this is the need for my names?) I am pulling back because I don't know who I am or what I want right now — No, that's a lie. I know what I want. I know exactly what I want. I want a life full of those snatches, I want to make a name for myself. To be known for my selflessness and always taking what I can, while giving what I can. I want to be a temple for the soul. The place where people can go to for a rest from the world.... I've already made a list of all these things, and they all have to do with other people. The phrase I exist in relation to you has never meant to much. Please... make me what I want to be.... I exist in relation to you. You make me real. 

 As for who I am, I have no idea where I stand with my actual being. I do not know if I enjoy the person I'm becoming. I have minimal confidence and only find solace in the way I do things. That is where I stand, in the way something is done. My product is not my pride and defense, it is my method. I guess all those years of art and english teachers telling me the product doesn't matter did get to me. The method, once refined enough, I believe will produce a masterpiece. This sounds something like that ever confusing statement of the end justifying the means. To me, the means make the end....

But I don't even want to get into that. I don't know who I am. I know what I want to do, but not who I want to be. Will my doing end up in my being? ....I think so. Yes. I think so if this method, means, end thing keeps up. 

 Regardless of the actions I want, I must admit that I am extremely caustic, abrasive and unpredictable at present. I am not going to be reasonable. I am not going to make sense. I will say one thing and do another. I will do one thing and say another. Hurricane season has hit. My world is in the state of forming, there are volcanic eruptions and violent atmospheric reactions happening. This is chaos. This is creation. I will be hard to tolerate. Please bear with me. My confusion is worth salsa dancing with. 

I think the scariest part, is I am on my own. This self is my own creation. This dance, is all my own. I have support beams, yes, but I am on my own in the very bare sense of things. As Joseph Conrad, I think, said. We dream and we live, alone. No one else can live our lives for us. And so:

Truth and Beauty are wonderful words, but shrapnel is shrapnel and at the end of the day I am alone with the things I have done

This essentially is a warning.

- L.Locke