Magnolia Blooms & Sakura Petals
By
Rebecca Anna Coleman

Prologue

The whole house was asleep. Which afforded me a measure of privacy I did not have during the day. According to the wall clock on the kitchen wall it was twelve o' ten in the morning. A rerun of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was playing in the background. And I was sitting at the family's computer. Trying my best to write something. I needed to write something. I had this burning desire to write something, I had ideas, but I did not have the voice.

But I guess at fourteen I was still developing that voice. At fourteen I was underweight, weighed around just under one hundred pounds, and stood little over five foot two and with shoulder length hair I was often mistaken as a girl. Which should have bothered me, but it didn't. Yes, I'd been bullied for my looks before, but one good elbow to the nose often sent a clear message. Also boys have an inherent weakness, the balls. One good swift kick in the balls is often enough to send even the most hardened country boy down to the ground.

There was something comical about watching a towering boy go down in front of you, with both his hands cupped, holding his balls as his eyes started to water and his friends took two or three steps back, the color having been drained from their faces, their eyes as wide as saucer plates, their eyebrows twitching in fear and their mouths curled into a smear of disbelief.

But none of that mattered now, what mattered was I could not write. And I wanted to write, a few months ago I'd created an account on Fanfiction.Net I'd wanted to share with the world or at least that very small corner of the internet my passion for writing. You see, I started writing two years ago when I was twelve. At that time I was struggling to read, and in order to help me read. Mom had brought me a Pokemon chapter book. Really it was Pokemon: I choose You! It was written by Tracey West. Now at the time I was obsessed with Pokemon.

How obsessed was I? Well I'd beaten the first three games and had captured, trained and caught all one hundred and fifty one of the first generation. And I'd gotten halfway to acquiring the additional one hundred Pokemon the second generation had introduced.

Something else the second generation had introduced to me that had really flipped my world upside. On my thirteen birthday my mother gifted me a new copy of Pokemon: Crystal which introduced the ground breaking feature of allowing you to choose either between starting your quest to become the premier Pokemon Master as a boy or a girl.

That had been the emotional catharsis that had triggered a massive landslide. What started out as a small, insufficient ball had quickly snowballed into a massive boulder the moment my mom had given me a used copy of Animal Crossing on my thirteenth birthday. For the first time I could choose to play not only as a girl but build from scratch a totally new digital life as a girl. It was around that time I started roleplaying on online forums. I did so as a girl.

As a girl I made friends with animals, as a girl I paid off a mortgage that was pushed on me by a loan-shark Tanuki. I dug for fossils, I furnished a house, I fished and built something of my own little world where I felt safe and secure. And the more I did it, the more I felt like I should have been born a girl all alone.

Now at fourteen, I felt at the bottom of my soul the stirring of something. Something I could not easily define. A desire to write, a desire to be free, a desire to be true to myself. A desire to become famous like my idol Kasuto of Kataan. A fanfiction writer who had written novel length fanfictions that focused on character Link, the main character in the Legend of Zelda series.

And under that current I felt moving something else, the desire to live as a girl. And compounding that maelstrom of emotions was the fact that I was suffering from a terrible writer's block.

But maybe the desire to write would be enough. Maybe life with all its trials, chances, and changes would provide me with the raw material I needed to really write. To write something people would not only read. But comment on. Something that one day I could turn into a full fledged novel. Because I wanted to write something besides just fanfiction.. I wanted to write original fiction.

End Prologue