A Confession ...

Here’s the thing. There are two Rebeccas. One is quite serious, not much fun at all, but we send her off to the office where she gleefully gathers galaxies of data, squishing it together before flattening and folding it into origami unicorns and paper tigers. Her boss is very fond of Rebecca’s unicorns and tigers, but this exhausted the other Rebecca. Mischievous Rebecca crawls from this orderly structure and seeks fun in very different ways. Exercising her creative muscles, Mischievous Rebecca has dabbled in drawing and flirted with music, but a dreadful lack of talent nearly caused her to become an accountant. Then she discovered photography. Mischievous Rebecca sees magical things through the microcosm of a macro lens, and with cameras being little more than compact computers these days, the two Rebeccas hugged it out and blissfully pressed the shutter. Yet, this wasn’t enough for Mischievous Rebecca. There had to be something out there that could be uniquely Rebecca, both of them. And there always had been. From her earliest memories, Mischievous Rebecca has created entire worlds in her head. Everything was fair game. Stones became knights and apples became fairies, but she never revealed her stories to the outside world. Not until one slipped out. Assigned to write a paper on something uninteresting and utterly unimaginative, Mischievous Rebecca decided to mess with the teacher. In a single paragraph, she built a world living within the stream of ink flowing from her pen. The creatures railed against the humans and their mediocre ideas. Countless died for doodles. They deemed the teacher guilty of wasting ink and demanded she be punished for her crime. Mischievous Rebecca was pleased and thoroughly expected a failing grade, but it didn’t turn out that way. The note in the margin read: "Beautiful! You should write for a living". Serious Rebecca immediately dismissed the idea, and once again took control until one day not so very long ago. While watching a kingfisher hovering over a marsh, his eye locked on a school of minnows pooling at her feet, it happened again. An entire community of trolls appeared in Mischievous Rebecca's mind. They were clever and childish, timid and sweet—they were nothing like we had been told. Sitting there on that bench, a story formed, a full story that she thought might be worth writing down. That’s how it happened. Mischievous Rebecca has reclaimed her uniqueness. Forty-two months later, the legend is complete, and ready to share with you. Mischievous Rebecca and Serious Rebecca cohabit peacefully now. They need each other, yet neither is dominant over the other. Serious Rebecca has her paper unicorns while Mischievous Rebecca has an entire universe in which to play.