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ok turns out i am 100% that dumbass bitch who still aint posted my intro on main....... so for reference..... hello! im nora ( she / her ). im a 24 year old creative writing graduate currently residing in sheffield, south yorkshire. when i’m not hunched over a keyboard writing, i enjoy independent cinema, chinese food, and big nights out that i’ll remember only in fleeting snapshots. i currently work as a barmaid and a tutor for a filmmaking project.

without further ado, here is my interpretation on the skeleton ‘ophelia’, a development of a character who’s been brewing at the back of my mind for absolutely AGES now so thank u for giving me the push to actually flesh her out.

ive included a full biography, but please feel free 2 skip to bullet points if TLDR because it is LOOONG..... and im so happy 2 be here.... new home.... chefs kiss.... yes lov u all

IN CHARACTER.

skeleton: ophelia name: theresa rigby. (goes by diminutives tess, tessa, tea or thea. the only time she’s theresa is when she’s in trouble.) age: 21, born july 10 (cancer) faceclaim: diana silvers. gender: cis-female. pronouns: she/her degree: comparative literature & ancient history (joint honours)

INTRO.

trigger warnings.

loss of a parent. missing person / disappearance. drugs and alcohol reliance. death.

BIOGRAPHY.

i. narragansett, rhode island.

1999, an Austrian sunrise, it is the year of the Water Monkey. A water baby, first screams under the surface, the catch of it gargled in your throat. A birth mark the size and shape of a door handle pressed into your pelvis like a lover’s badge. Born like a clenched fist. Annie always wished you’d be more like an open palm. You still carry that tension with you, an unreadable kind of silence when you slink around the edge of a room or perch on an arm rest like a bird about to startle and fly off. Nobody knows a thing about you and you like it that way. Conceived in the winter, some of that coldness still lingers in you.

The only perfect girl is a dead girl. That’s what you learned, last-born runt of the litter growing up in the bedroom of a girl who would be forever cold, young and pretty. In the beginning, they thought you were a blessing — Bet’s soul reincarnate, the same pale face they’d seen as they’d signed her into the pick ‘n’ mix family. You were given her clothes, her room, even her middle name, stripped and rebranded like a toy doll bought after the last one’s head was chewed off by the dog. Four boys, a dead sister, and you who — with your birdlike features and unrelenting eyes — was merely a walking ghost. Tennis skirts, nail varnish, a shag rug, a rotten corsage; these were the staple reminders that you were living in a shrine, the room never quite your own lest you disturb the lingering presence of Bet. Soon, you began to see it as not a room but rather a prison cell caging you in the imprint of a sister you never met.

Your mothers met at an undergraduate socialist meeting when the fall semester fell into winter, Kath in a mustard coloured beret, Annie in a blood-orange duffle coat, a philosophy major and an art historian respectively. Your childhood was a montage of potato printing eels onto the walls of a Rhode Island boarding house next to the sea. Five children — some adopted, some surrogate — a permanent rotation of rooms and always a handful of lodgers to foot the bill. Travelling salesmen, students on gap years and tinkers in search of odd-jobs became a flipbook of faces etched into your memories like fleeting figures in the wings of a theatre; you sketch them into the body of your work. They become the characters to haunt the pages of your notebooks, stashed beneath floorboards lest they fall into too-hungry flour-caked fingers, scones baking in the oven two floors below. A house that seemed to physically inhale every time a new body entered it, tall and thin, too small to house all that weight. The gaps beneath the floorboards are the only spaces that feel like your own, untouched by a girl who’s shadow you were born in. In your diary, you scribble her name until it tears through the pages thinking that if you wish hard enough, you’ll make yourself her. It’s never enough.

At twelve, you lose Annie to a boating accident. You lose a piece of yourself with her and stop wearing yellow. Grief makes a better writer out of you though it sounds selfish to admit it. Kath remarries the following spring, a man named Peter. He is ordinary in all the ways Annie was magical and when he sits in your mother’s chair you feel yourself slip out of your skin and into the body of a raven cawing in the woods, scratching at the dustmites. You try to teach yourself how to be a girl, though you’ve always felt more like a wild thing crouched in the attic window of the lighthouse, screaming at the crash of the waves. You wanted to love the sea as closely as it owned you. In the sea you were rewritten into a tide, into a shell, into the swell of a rockpool around the body of a crab. You wanted to be like the ocean —a tangible, changeling thing —making paper boats and setting them out to sea, wishing you could shrink yourself into one, sail away. For a while, you toy with the idea of starving yourself into something the size and shape of an eel; of growing gills in the night and darting into the ebbing current. They’d think you crazy if you told them.

ii. concord, massachusetts.

You butt heads with Kath on a daily basis. She tells you you resent her for moving on with her life when you seem unable to move on with yours. That maybe a clean break would be best for all the family. A fresh start. A change of scene. You lock yourself in the bathroom and cry for an hour until your mouth feels raw, like running a cheesegrater down the inside of your throat. The following September, they send you to boarding school, two suitcases and an armful of Annie’s jumpers. Kath has decided they don’t compliment her skin tone, and she’s not twenty-five or studying philosophy any more. New England becomes the best decision for you that your family have ever made. You thrive on the independence of living in a dormitory on a corridor of Alison’s and Margaret’s and Ruth’s. From the names on their doors, you paint them into people in your head, red-haired Ruth who collects birth stones and can count to twenty in Mandarin. They turn out to be nothing like the versions of them you’ve spun. You love them anyway, their rough-softness, the scuffed knee thrill of growing up half-wild. There’s a brightness in their girlhood that you try to capture in your words.

Though you never quite find yourself settling into a group, Dr. Franklin becomes the anchor to which you tether yourself to, a little girl leeching onto her Literature professor for a sense of stability in a tempestuous world. The others might think it sad, but she sees something in you — an inner restlessness, a need to analyse and observe and contain everything within poetry and prose — that reminds her of herself at your age. You begin one-to-one sessions after the school day has closed, whisper about Proust and O’Hara over frothed lattes in a campus-run coffee shop, ink blots on the pages of dog-eared copies she’s gifted to you on an indefinite loan. Sometimes, you think you love her. You run your fingers over the buttons of her typewriter, close your eyes, and imagine yourself pulling on her skin like a new coat.

The woods become your saviour. In Narragansett you never knew woods, only harboursides, seafood restaurants, the smell of the ocean breeze and a lighthouse calling you home. You learn to love the smell of the earth after rain. The feeling of soil between your toes. The sense of belonging you feel trailing through the woods in stark white nightgown, twigs catching on the mud-stained hem. Massachusetts becomes a place of revision. You remake yourself as a fawn, elegance in your limbs and hunger in your heart. You learn how to write yourself into being. There’s a violence in your grace — simultaneously glass and the hammer that shatters it — and despite the ethereal way you move it’s the leonine stature of a tigress, claws bared, teeth sharpened into fangs, but a smile like butter wouldn’t melt. Lady Macbeth was always your favourite of Shakespeare’s heroines. There’s something dark in her that resonates with you, the way when a pimple appears you have to squeeze it until it bleeds. You tell yourself that everybody has a morbid fascination.

Each night you take a torch, a book and a bottle of Merlot, and you wile away the hours reading in the woods. At home, sleep never came easy to you. You’d pace the floorboards counting sheep and wake having barely slept a blink. This, on the other hand, seems useful, though when you’re never asleep, you’re never quite awake, floating through the school day like a ghost, part removed, the dark circles pulling your eyes to a close. It’s a tiredness you carry in every aspect of your life, limbs heavier than usual, pen slower when it grazes the page. Soon you start taking tablets each night. Two white ones, no bigger than a baby’s fingernail. For the first time, you begin to dream.

When February rolls around you take your exams. Pass with the grace of a swan in everything except AP Calculus. You say you’ll try again next semester, but you don’t. You apply for Yale, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia, Ashcroft. You wait. And wait. And wait until it feels like your skin has shed itself since the letters left your hands, before an envelope comes marked Theresa. No one ever calls you that name. Right from the start it’s been Tea, Tess, Thea, common names in your house as fickle as the tide that swallows it. Billy’s never been a William, and Sebastian sounds all wrong. You can scarcely remember what Brodie’s short for. Rejection after rejection until Ashcroft answers the call, a cawing in the dark of a wasteland you’ve not yet walked. You’ll read literature, follow in the footsteps of Ginsberg who you clumsily try to quote as you bid the girls goodbye, a bonfire and the smell of cinnamon whiskey.

iii. ashcroft university, edinburgh.

You’d read of a boy who went missing there. It happened in the woods. Seventy years and all they’d found was an emptied bottle of wine and one shoe. Newspapers claimed involvement in an elite society, perhaps a hazing gone wrong, and you imagine them burrowed in underground tunnels wearing wellington boots and tweed. This is what draws you to Ashcroft ; to Imperium. It’s not so much the mystery of it —you’ve never seen yourself as a Nancy Drew — but more the idea of living in a place where people can disappear. That’s always been an idle fantasy of yours. One day, you wonder if you’ll write yourself out of the world and into the pages of a book, nestled between a title and contents page.

From Concord to Boston, then a ten-hour flight ; for the first time in months, you sleep through the night. A line break cancels your train and you have to take a replacement bus service instead. By the time you reach the school, the open day is almost over. You feel it at the gates, like a tingle on the back of your neck, something crawling down your spine. It only grows as you close in on it. It feels like it knows your own heartbeat. You’ve never known a building to have so much soul. You imagine yourself walking the cobblestones on the quad each day, climbing the steps to a dormitory, sprawled on a library table, scribbling frantically, willing the clock hands backwards. It’s a life you want to lead.

In a matter of months, Ashcroft has become not only your home but your life. You are utterly consumed by it. You meet Lysander at a poetry reading. You recite Shelley. He recites Keats. He compliments you on the steadiness of your voice, clear as a bell. A voice for the stage. You tell him your father had a powerful voice. It’s a lie. You’ve never had a father, but it’s fun to imagine one slouched on the couch, wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose. He invites you to dinner the following week. Grilled sea bass and risotto. You don’t have the heart to tell him you’ve become a vegetarian, swallow each mouthful with your pride. You try out for the orchestra, though your hands shake a little too much and you hear more from the inside of your own head than the keys. You leave without waiting on an answer. It’s too contained for you, anyway. You need something more chaotic, like jazz. You wish for chaos, so Imperium opens it jaws and swallows you whole. They like you because of your voice, a voice that speaks scarcely more than a low whisper in life, but when written wins you a Bysshe-Shelley Prize. In poetry, you give that voice to the voiceless ; bring dead girls buried in the woods out of the ground and into being, like soil in your hands. A voice like that is a powerful thing to have in your ranks. It becomes every page in your diary, every catch of your skirt on a tree branch, every rap of your fingertips against the desktop, imperium, imperium, imperium.

You’ve never been able to do things by halves — you always let them consume you. One glass becomes a bottle. One paragraph becomes scrawling until sunrise. Obsession takes its form in Hamlet, strong in all the ways you appear weak. You like the smell of his breath when he tells you to stub out your cigarette. That’ll kill you one day, he says. I know, you reply, and your pretty lips curl upwards. One drunken night, you fall into his bed and imagine stitching yourself into his sheets so you can sleep with him every night. Tongues on your thighs like a voice in your throat. Touch me, touch me, touch me. Never been held like this before. Like you’re not glass, but something material and robust. You like the way his hands feel under your skin. Perhaps you’ll keep him there like a splinter. Tall for your age but thin as a rail, he makes you feel like more than an eel of a girl. You like the way he catches on your spindly elbows where others have snagged leaving trails of cotton. At first, it’s only physical, but you get greedy and want more. You’re not sure when a love of beauty became something more than skin deep. You’re not sure if you even loved him until he’d stopped loving you. In October, you find the body. The day all the clocks stop ticking. The day something inside of you snaps like the branch of an elm.

You become a cocoon, velvet ribbons in your hair and rope around your throat. Or maybe it’s lace, and you’re only imagining it that way. You drink wine, stumble blind-drunk through the woods, lose textbooks to nature and curse when you can’t find them the following morning. Most nights, you appear like a ghost in the wood, a linen nightdress with mud clinging to it’s hem and feet laden in soil. You’re not sure if it’s conscious at this point, or mindless sleepwalking. Everything you do feels like sleepwalking these days. Shadows move in the corners of your eyes at night and you turn to the tarot cards for answers. They tell you only of that which you already know. Death. The Hanged Man. High Priestess. You think of Octavia, of Lysander, and of you pulled like a ragdoll between them, with the intuition that comes from living by the sea but without the evidence to execute it. The pills have stopped working. You wake in sweats, guilt swelling in the pit of your stomach. In a therapist’s waiting room, you watch as a girl scratches the skin off her own arm.

Soon news of your occultist proclivities becomes gossip on everyone’s tongue. Witch becomes a synonym for your name, and one you’ll happily wear like a noose until you’ve stolen Lysander from the drop. Finding the truth becomes the only thing keeping you sane, runes scrawled on the walls of a dormitory where pages of novels are tacked up like wallpaper. And still, you can’t shake the fact that she hasn’t come to you when the others who scarcely believe in such phantomed are rattled by her ghost on a nightly basis. Competing and girlhood go hand in hand, but the longer it gets, the more it feels like she knows your desperation to absolve Lysander isn’t entirely selfless. Perhaps she saw you lingering in doorways, waiting in the wings for him to change his mind and tell you it was you all along. Or maybe the sight of her corpse is making you search for answers in places they don’t exist. You’re hanging on my a single thread, one glimpse away from fleeing to the woods to plant yourself into the earth.

The snow is crisp on the November ground when you learn to love melancholy like a dance you were taught as a child. You think it adds depth to being a writer. How can a person write about pain if they live in a state of blissful oblivion? You tell yourself that all of the best writers were depressed; Plath, Fitzgerald, Dickinson, Rice. If you say their names each morning, followed by your own, perhaps you’ll become one of them.

BULLET POINT SUMMARY.

here is a bullet point summary of theresa, as i understand my writing can get a little dense.

Mother always said that people who grow up near water are different to other people. That there’s something more primal in their bones. A kind of knowing.

In Theresa, the knowing is a kind of silence. She’s always struggled with verbal communication, and it’s rare that she can ever let herself go in a conversation. She’s the one on the outskirts of the group, only speaking up to deliver a poignant metaphor, before fading off again. On a good day she’ll ramble, perhaps, on morbid longings and fascinations, but it’s like she’s always skipping around words she can’t quite pinpoint.

Writing’s different. When she’s writing, she feels like all the dead souls of Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are all rising up from their graves to possess her. It is, perhaps, a rather egotistical thought -- but it makes her feel less alone. Like writing isn’t so much a solitary pursuit as it is a reigniting of what’s been lost, a way of listening to the dead. She’s militant in the way she writes, has been for as long as she can remember -- every night when the clock strikes twelve. Even if she’s rolling on mandy in an abandoned warehouse or dropping acid in a shipyard with her toes in the sand, she’ll start scribbling at twilight, for as long as she can. Back home, there weren’t too many bars that allowed underage kids, and the ones that did would nail your phone to the wall like you’re living in the eighties, so they made their own fun getting high in places long since infested with rats on baggies bought cheap in the back of the dry-cleaners shop.

Theresa’s always felt more able to relate to dead people than to living ones. That might sound depressing, but she doesn’t think so. Death has never been far from her. She grew up in the room of a foster sister who had died the previous winter. She lost her mother to a boating accident at twelve years old. She lost Octavia last year, found her body in the woods, and was thankful that she -- and not someone else -- had seen her crumpled like a fawn. Because even though it clings to her and burrows under her skin, she knows how to drown it out now. In words. In wine. In pills crushed against the veneer of a sink and snorted through a twenty-dollar bill. She’s getting good at losing herself completely. Theresa herself feels like a girl half-dead, like something ghostly, trapped between two planes. Which is why it hurts so much that she still hasn’t seen Octavia’s ghost. She’s supposed to be the special one. The one who’s vision isn’t clouded by idle dogmatism. The one who believes in all that fate, juju, third eye stuff that the others seem to scoff at. It feels like a personal attack. Like somehow, in keeping hidden, she’s blaming Theresa for her death.

Theresa is the month of November. There’s something mysterious about it, something cold. It’s on the cusp of the end of the year, but it doesn’t quite reach it. I feel like that’s what Theresa’s like. Always reaching for the apples that are just out of her grasp, or perhaps, reaching for apples which aren’t even there.

She knows grief like an old friend, but somehow, she still doesn’t trust it. When she was twelve years old she lost one of her mothers. Annie was always the brighter of her parents, and Tessa never really believed that someone so full of life could just disappear. Her soul had to be somewhere. When Kath remarried, Theresa never forgave her. Between grief and anger, their relationship became fractious, and Kath decided to send her to boarding school. She went to a New England college where she learned art, history, literature, english, athletics, the sciences and the classics. Boarding school was probably the best decision for Theresa that Kath had ever made. She became fascinated with the girls around her, so feral and wild in their girlhood. She fell in love with another girl more than once. She fell in love with the freedom of New England, of being in the woods, of a gaggle of girls with bottles of wine sat around a campfire, scared half to death that the matron would find them.

But death’s never far from her. She’s been searching for Annie in the linebreaks between poems, in the chaos of clutter under her bed, under lace and linen in her underwear drawer, but somehow she can never quite find her and never give up. Finding Annie was perhaps the reason she came to Ashcroft at all. She intended to go to Columbia, read Literature, and clumsily follow in the footsteps of Ginsberg. But Annie had spoken of Edinburgh with such a childlike awe.

Lysander was the first of the society she met, at a poetry reading in the autumn of her first semester. He brought her into the club because he saw something in her, an otherworldliness, a still but powerful voice. Her eyes saw more than they let on, always glinting at something more. She thinks her closeness with Lysander is the reason she still hasn’t seen Octavia’s ghost, and now Hamlet’s out of the picture she’s starting to think she might love Lysander. Or maybe she just needs to be loved by someone, and absolving him of blame is the key.

She was never really sure how she felt about Octavia. One moment they were friends, the next they were rivals. It was something like love and hate combined, but perhaps that’s just the curse of being a woman. A fierce sense of competition in everything you do, even if it’s just competing for air.

She likes old French music, European cinema, art that doesn’t come in her mother tongue. She’s always thought English pointless. The French say things so much better.

Her favourite TV show is Twin Peaks. She likes the absurdist truth in it, the style, the colour, the oddness. She likes the mystery of it all. She loved the woods in New England and it reminds her of that. A kind of home away from home. Tea brings a pocked dictaphone out with her, for she’s so often absent-minded that she misses half the day. That way, she can replay conversations, the sound of a bird in flight, the particular inflection in the voice of someone she loves. She’s obsessive when it comes to lovers. She doesn’t want to be loved -- she wants to be respected, understood, devoured. She thinks love is a kind of mutual lying.

She finds truth in the unusual. In tarot cards and horoscopes, in the position of the planets through a thrifted telescope. She’s a night owl, never in bed before 3 or 4 in the morning. She visits the woods each night to write until her fingers ache. Sometimes with wine, sometimes with mushrooms, sometimes with a tab against the flat of her tongue, imagining herself to be Alice in Wonderland. She feels like she’s getting close to the truth, but maybe she’s just closer to losing her mind.

LETTER TO OCTAVIA.

My dearest O,

I wish I could find an adequate way to write you an epitaph. You saw a poet where everyone else saw a foolish dreamer and yet you’re the only one I can’t put into words. But in truth, there is no word large enough to contain you. You were the ellipsis I was always looking to conclude, and it’s so like you to steal even that from me. Some days, I think I could love you.

Please know that death cannot touch girls like us. That you’re more than just skin, teeth and bone. Death itself has you only on a short-term loan. As Thomas puts so eloquently, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thank you for filling me with life. I’ll see you in the next one.

Tea.

anything else?

mock blog.

wanted plots.

someone who theresa knows purely from seeing them at the library. recently, she hasn’t been visiting as often. she’s less in the world and more in her head. her schoolwork is suffering. someone who feels this absence like a missing tooth.

unlikely bc ashcroft is in scotland but if they’re from rhode island maybe distant relatives.... ophelia / theresa is adopted so could work regardless of heritage. her family lived in narragansett, but she went to boarding school in vermont. could have met if ur character is new england based??? maybe

give me fellow wanky pretentious art-lovers and poets and historians who will go to museums and galleries with her and listen to the velvet underground on vinyl

people she gets mortally fucked off her tits with at parties bcos this baby is not alright. she drinks at least one glass of wine every night. sometimes a bottle. she’s always a little bit high or a little bit weary with a comedown. she can’t seem to keep her feet on the ground.

theresa was pretty numb after finding the body, as you would be. she stayed in her room listening to enya for three days straight and just eating cereal straight out the box. then thalia broke up with her and that fuckin shook her too, and now she just thinks she’s unlovable. she’s always been pretty bad at sleeping but now she just wanders about in her white nightdress looking for a door with light spilling beneath it so that maybe she can find someone who’ll hold her for the night and make her feel like she’s still alive

she’s currently hooking up with a lot of people. a lot of very detached sex, so if she has any sort of close connection with your character this might not work. could be good for angst or awkwardness though, or she cld get like.... super attached after a one night stand and complicate the shit out of everything. theresa’s kind of obsessive when it comes to her affections, she loves with her whole heart or not at all

people she used to date or unrequitedly likes, but to them it’s just a physical thing, give me all the thirsty angst plots, and maybe some softness too, i need some religion in this girls life jesus

honestly everything just give me all the plots

#stands on the rooftop and screams like a banshee as i fling this into the woods #spectreintro #very late and personally i think that's incredibly sexy of me x

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