On some evenings, she would search through various internet archives. She would look through various porn sites, though without the intention of picking actresses to star in her own skit. She found three main actresses, three of which starred in either a horror or porn film. Either they would act in horror fantasy specials in movies, or being a one off in an old porn set. She fantasized about them from their Victorian clothes, to the wooden shoes they worn in historical sets, to different styles of modern tomboy wear.

At night she would dream about holding them by the wrist, and carrying them aloft over the forest to catch the wind, or at other times unable to catch despite all her effort as they fall to the Earth below. In the city, during the rainstorms, she would travel the airwaves on her own, through different passenger airbuses. And would make a stop at the local station to browse comics. But she could never be satisfied of the different selections of genres, preferring more academic picture collections, sold at different conventions across the US.

On other nights, she would collect various reference images, usually involving French, Italian, and Spanish girls. But sometimes Japanese girls, in different types of fashion. It was something of a balancing act between finding fashion pins on most days, and finding actresses on others. She couldn’t quite pin point the exact reason she was drawn to these actresses, except that the way they looked reminded her various types of girls she disliked in high school, especially those with lighter hair colors.

She had had issues with blond girls with glasses, thanks to one short girl she knew in high school, that although she never found out first hand that that girl was not into her, on a level that made it all the worse. Because she would have rather been told them personally, rather than told second hand by her best friend at the time, who had been a guy friend she knew that could have been a part of fencing club. So the association stuck that girls with that hair color were generally passive aggressive. She tries to fight this urge, but it wasn’t always easy.

Somehow, in the back of her mind, the reason that she would look for different actresses, was to produce her own horror screenplay. Star them in a film where they’re the ones that would be told by second hand, that they were not her type. After throwing them under the bus, both literally and metaphorically. In this desire, her life became something an shaking sea, with the ship she rode on narrowly avoiding iceburgs, and finally ancoring on distanting tropical islands in uncharted territory.

Because of this tendency, she distanced herself from people she knew both on and off the web. In the few chatrooms that she kept, she would stay behind the scenes do to there being at least one person that would turn everything she said into some kind of argument, while telling her she was the one that was causing these arguments to happen. They would happen regardless of how often she posted. As her mom would say, absence made the heart grow fonder. And yet as the night comes to close, she finds herself preferring the company of images of the net. Because they were more like people than actual people. She could imagine whatever personalities she wanted them to have.

She took to the idea of collaboration in web comics, as a thing of apprehension. She would rather be stuffed in tight rooms, conducting human experiments—in works of fiction of course. Prodding them with her dip pen. Thinking of them as actors on a movie set. And she would think:

— It’s nice to meet you, miss curly blond berry.

Without telling them how to act in their own story, after finding them inside adult film indexes, and anime credit sequences. — Just dance around like victorian chess pieces. And the rest will fall into place.