"Nothing can alter my destiny: listen to my little history, and you will perceive how irrevocably it is determined."
- Victor to Walton, Frankenstein, Letter IV in the 1818 text
I feel the need to start at least one generation back. My parents left Venezuela with me in 2010, when I was four, because the city we lived in at the time had the second-highest homicide rate in the world. I grew up - am growing up - in small-town Virginia, ostensibly bilingual, with an exotic past like a snakeskin and a completely novel future. The world sputtered to an anxious halt as my parents rumaged for jobs and I waded my way through school, picking up little histories on the way. Come to think of it, I spent a lot of time alone during the first few years. I learned my full name in fourth grade and I could remember my cousins by sixth, I picked Spanish back up in eigth grade and by this time I was supposed to have visited "home" by now but it didn't pan out. Around that time I sunk my teeth into literature and philosophy to fill the homeland-shaped hole in me and it hasn't worked yet. I'm hoping to get into an ivy league college because people tell me that it will fix me. I'll put my college essay here, probably, so that you can learn some more because this doesn't do a very good job.
Update 10.24: Here's the college essay my counselor told me not to submit.
This site is a pet project that I made in a herculean feat of procrastination to avoid schoolwork, college applications, and an independent research paper - I'm only available to work on it as much as school allows, which is little to none; hence the construction. The original Firefly Factory was a small project I ran on notion for a little while but never really put my heart into - the name is a phrase that came into my head in the summer of 2022 from the sight of driving up I-95 in the dark, seeing the single-file rows of headlights and streetlamps and constellations like comets orbitting a highway of stars.
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