
"She's a remarkably attractive woman."
"isn't she?"
"there's a certian quality about her, a certian fineness. she seems to be absolutely fine and straight.....i don't know how to descrive the quality. i suppose it's breeding."
I closed the book because I had to go to bed, firmly deciding i wanted those words to be said about me. somehow, i wanted people to immediately notice there was a "certian quality" about me, that i was different and unusual. "absolutely fine and straight" something original and attractive. i definitely wanted that to be me, i decided firmly. i had two days to make it work, two days until college started and i had the chance to be this new person. i stood up and stared into the mirror. there i was, myself. a pretty girl. i'm a pretty girl, especially at night when my eyes somehow get bigger and brighter, and my hair has been messed throughout the day and now looks nearly beachy perfect. I close Hemingway, quite sure that I will be Lady Brett Ashley in school. yeah right. When you read his Farewell To Arms, you thought you were going to be Catherine Barkley. Now i felt convicted. I had fallen in love with so many women, women i'm sure were going to be me. somehow i was convinced tat i could be perfect pieces of all of them. well, why couldn't i? why couldn't i be wide-eyed like Catherine and refined like Brett, while being playful like Zooey Deschanel and ice queen like Angelina Jolie. I could be it all, right? No. At that exact moment, staring into my bathroom mirror, it occured to me. to try to be all of them at once would make me none of them. it would make me an unclear, silly little girl who nobody is interested in because she wasn't anything. she had no defintion. i couldn't do it. i would really have to choose. choose just one, just one of my many female role models who i had so treasured. each time i saw one on tv, read a character, watched a character, i would become her. i couldn't do that. I just have to be Kate.
But who exactly is Kate?
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