You are a little girl who loves her books more than her dolls – although you like them well enough… dressing them up, changing them around, spinning different stories for each of them in your head … a new story for a new disguise, always.

Life looks always more interesting in a book – there at last people have layers upon layers, and each complex character is constantly on the verge of some intriguing adventure.

Your greater disappointment is realizing that in the real world it is rarely like that. People love banality. Worse than that, they tend to kill what sets them apart from preconceived norm.

Even if normal is a statistic and, therefore, not a real thing, people crave it.

For you, it is not like that.

You want a life like a novel. Not a romance novel, to be precise, because you don't get the fascination with those, and not a fairy tale, but something with substance, a classic.

You love your parents dearly but oh, how often you wish they could just… understand you.

You are good to read people and behaviors, and most of time you feel like you can relate to adults more than you do to other children. Bu adults don't ever take your advice or opinions seriously – they call you wise and mature beyond your years but, that's where it ends, and you don't get it, for the longest time.

Over years, the craving to be understood is something you suppress ruthlessly. It won't ever happen, no matter how hard you try, and accepting it is sort of a liberation.

At school you get picked on a lot. The excuse is that you are apparently not a pretty child. Your face is round and flat like a plate, they say. Nobody likes you, they insist.

You guess it is more a matter of you defying statistics. Know-it-alls are not supposed to be proud of themselves, to walk with their chin high, and be bold or cheeky. They are not supposed to feel superior.

You don't feel superior at first. You walk through most of middle school convinced that you are just unfortunate in meeting large numbers of not-so-brilliant-ones.

The day you stop and take stock of your experiences, and realize it's you who is just different, and that's chasm between you and the rest of the world is meant to never be filled … is a lonely, cold, painful day.

But from that day on, your reality makes sense in a way it did not before, and for that you are grateful.

What is real is already so, owning up to it won't make it any worse.

Before, you looked to the universe as an unfolding mystery, you met new people and you were eager to unravel the stories hidden inside of them.

After, you accepted that the world was what it was, and that if you wanted it interesting, *you *had to make it so.

Mostly, the world was made of people, and people made it back.

You, Jamie Moriarty, looked at people and saw games waiting to happen.

You could spin a story and make it real, test what your friends and family were truly made of in the process.

At last, you found a way you could relate to them that felt both real and significant to you.

You hit your sixteen, and you blossom into a woman.

You discover the curves of your body like a poet would learn to make poetry.

Your breasts are full and firm, high and soft, your legs are long and slender. You are not too thin nor too round. Suddenly, you become popular for the very reasons you used to be an outcast.

Boys notice of you, girls get jealous on occasion.

You? You are amused at the change, but more interested in sketching and painting and sculpting, discovering art and the beauty of a concept that becomes form. The attention you receive is a fun diversion until you realize something else: beauty for a woman needs to be a weapon, a tool she can use comfortably. Otherwise it becomes too easily a hindrance, a picture to guys jerk off and girls pin their expectations upon, something other people want to exploit you for. A reason to be dismissed and objectified.

No, than you.

You make of your looks a canvas on which you can paint yourself anew every time you want. You learn fashion can be intellectually stimulating if you conceive it like this.

You are your masterpiece, and your beauty is something you construct. A thousand others out of there are more classically beautiful than you are, and they waste so much time over it, to maintain it, to resurrect every day the pretense they are up to the standard.

You disregard standard and care about the nuances, the changing light of your appearance. You dress to make love to yourself, to raise a shield around your intelligence. It is never about impressing others, that is your secret, it is about giving yourself what you deserve.

On occasion, you shoplift for fun.

Just to see if you can manage it and get away wit it.

Your criminal career tough starts when you date a guy who makes synthetic drugs in his basement.

What draws you to him is his intellect, the fact he is different. He can't believe the luck of this geek who is finally getting the beautiful, intelligent, artsy girl, popular in all ways he is not. He adores you for it.

You bring your business acumen to his drug dealing, get his work more organized, his trade more far-reaching.

It's all fun. A game at first.

Then you realize you have a certain touch with those things, as his dealers begin to look up to you, as you direct them toward other areas ... it is easy to expand, almost too much, and you realize you found your calling, your key to a life like a novel.

Your sex and your looks are an advantage, your intellectualism is a perfect cover.

Nobody expects somebody like you to turn to a criminal life just because it is intellectually stimulating.

You use that. You learn to use everything.

The pregnancy is an accident whose value you can appreciate.

You don't dream of picket-fences, you are not interested in marriage, you never felt a particularly motherly streak in your heart. So you won't get another chance to see your belly swell with a new life, you know.

This is child is it for you, last occasion you will allow yourself to pass your genes to someone else, to be part of something greater. To be connected to another being.

You talk to the child in heart of the night, when you can't sleep. Always in your mind she is a girl, and you wish on her to be intelligent, more than beautiful.

I might give you the world, little one, but it won't be me, watching you as you learn to walk, as you say your first word. Yet I hope so much for you, and I love you before knowing you. It doesn't make sense, but I feel it. You are already my contradiction.

In the end, you want your daughter, with a depth you don't quite understand, a primitive force that leaves you aching when you let her go, leaving her to other arms, to a whole another life that won't include you in any shape.

But… it's because you want her that you let her go. She deserves to grow up safe, but more than that she deserves to be someone's center of the world, and you are not wired that way.

You are made to be your own world, and to build an empire.

Holmes is a discovery.

The idea that there's truly a mind that might rival yours out of there, a man you might see as an equal and not a pleasant kill-time is more than a bit exciting.

You want to meet him, to seize up the threat he poses but more than anything, you want to play.

You wait and wait for him to see the signs, to catch Jamie behind Irene.

He never does.

For all his intelligence, he is caught up in the dream of a woman he can set up on a pedestal, but that will stop just short enough to not be a true companion. Like all men, he wants a prize and not an equal, so he can't see you, not the way you see him, simply because he does not desire it.

You hate that it hurts you to state it.

I might have loved you.

It shames you, that after all those years and all your progress you still craved companionship, that you found that temptation in him and you gave in, even only for a moment.

You know that you will punish him for this disappointment.

But you will let him live.

He is still a piece of art – his beautiful mind, his complex self, and the body that for months pleased you so well – and you believe in preserving art.

Truly beautiful things are so rare.

Author 's Note: if you happen on 8tracks, I have a fanmix hosted there that is a companion for this character piece. Look for 'Becoming Moriarty' by queenofcups. I hope you enjoyed both!