It was in the brisk November air of Tibbie Medina's eighth birthday where she had her first brush with death. The second would come at twelve, the third at fifteen, and the fourth, the latest, would occur at age twenty-three, but it was the first that Tibbie held mosta accountable for the derailment of her life's trajectory. It wouldn't have been a birthday without gifts and it was on the seat of her brand new pink bicycle that she flew down her hilly san Francisco street with as much recklessness an eight year old could muster, hot pink streamers trailing from her white handlebars and flapping around her like her very own set of wings. Tibbie was winning. Her brother, Noah, was a bit behind her on his own bike, but the race mattered less to her now and when her eyes drifted from the sidewalk it was not to eye her competitor but the sky in all its cloudy glory. For a second her eyes fluttered closed and she imagined she was a bird. Only she wasn't a bird, she was an eight year old girl, and such a daydream was enough to veer her bike off-track and slam it into the side of a parked car.

The bike crashed to a halt; Tibbie did not. She flew again, her helmet slammed with a resounding thunk as she was vaulted onto the hood fo the car and she skid across it before tumbling onto the hard asphalt of the street. A car screeched, stopping a mere foot in front of her, as Tibbie lay face down on the road, heart pounding in her ears and the metallic taste of blood in her mouth. The events immediately following were a whirlwind of screams and cries and stitches and Tibbie was left with a faint scar along her elbow and the thrilling, lasting sensation of what it feels like to have your feet leave the ground.

Which is all very nice and neat in its metaphoric package but the truth was Tibbie's life had probably always been hurtling itself down that path. She was born seven minutes after her brother Noah to a pair of young parents who could have used at least another seven hours to grasp the immediate reality of parenting one child, nevermind two. Arturo, or Artie, and Cristina had been college sweethearts at USC and married shortly after their graduation not out of love but out of a shared overwhelming fear. Cristina was pregnant, with twins no less, and just as the two had been poised to further their educations, Cristina was instead forced to relocate to San Francisco with Artie and move in with his mother. The move was a necessity for neither knew what they were doing and this live-in babysitter (as much of a mothering force to Artie and Cristina as she was to the twins) allowed for Artie to enroll into an English PHD program.

One baby was hard, but two seemed particularly impossible and it was just before the twins third birthday when Cristina decided she had had enough. She fled to the East Coast, finally free to enroll in medical school as she had planned, and focused all of her parental guilt into helping to provide for them financially - with her father's money.

This was neither the first nor the last time Cristina ran away from her problems but it was the last Artie would tolerate for himself. The two were divorced by twenty-five and Artie's mother, Isabel, was the main motherly figure in her grandchildren's lives. Artie, though slightly absent due to his determination to finish his schooling while also working, was a lovely father. Dreamy and sensitive in a way most weren't and reading his children his favorite pieces of poetry instead of fairy tales at night.

Tibbie grew up with all of Artie's dreaminess and all of Cristina's fire - a combination that left her seeking out the world she romanticized with an unmatched fierceness. She'd drift off into daydreams of a thousand hypotheticals and crash her way through attempts to test them. Not knowing was something Tibbie both loved and resented, and heated theoretical debate could only be rivaled by a quest for answers. The impossibles and unknowns were where she was drawn to and through a love for history and people - the greatest unknowable mysteries of them all! - Tibbie became, well, Tibbie. A startling combination of contradicting thoughts, morals, and personality traits.

She was thoughtful of emotions while wild with actions and caring of others while reckless with the idea of her own impermanence. Boundaries were to be test but Tibbie liked to ensure that only she would be caught in the aftermath.

She was untamable. Or so she thought.

She was six when her father met Alexis, seven when the two got married and moved out of Isabel's house and eight when Tibbie's reign as the youngest child came screaming (literally screaming, Tibbie hadn't realized that babies were so loud) to an end. Her tenure as middle child ended a year after and once another girl was born, Tibbie was eleven and realizing her actions had consequences. Only the consequences were sometimes just as interesting.

Despite her insatiable curiosity, Tibbie wasn't a bad kid. She was polite, though a bit loud, and well-mannered, if sometimes a bit space when it came to rules. Her fire never died but as she grew older and closer to Alexis she learned to channel it towards research. Of course the knowledge she sought wasn't always Alexis' first choice (as a math teacher she simply couldn't logically understand the amount of books Tibbie read on researching magic) but she admired her step-daughter's literary attack regardless.

Older still and Tibbie began to realize that it was not only knowledge that yielded power but appearances as well. Tibbie, being Tibbie, had always been a bit different but fueled by her mother (both in abandonment issues and her inherent coolness hat Tibbie was desperate to emulate) she began to discover this could be used to her advantage. Her weirdness became more showcased and in high school Tibbie became a dreamy hippie version of herself that even Arite thought bordered on too whimsical.

Throughout it all, Noah was her one true ally and best friend, a grounding presence that brought Tibbie's head both out of the clouds and out of her ass. A force that was greatly missed when the two separated for college. It was, in reality, hardly a separation as the two left San Francisco for the same destination: Tibbie studying at UCLA and Noah at USC. Tibbie, starting fresh and as alone as she had even been, fell deeper into her act of pretending. She still loved to study history and debate the nuances of humanity but this was layered under the freshman befriending of all the theatre and art kids. She spent way too much time at independent coffee shops for a girl that couldn't even finish cup herself. Tibbie went from being a small girl who didn't are what people thought of her to a woman who cared too much about people thinking she didn't care.

Stupid, really, but it did have the upside of getting her on television.

In an effort to impress her new friends, Tibbie began attending open auditions with them and at one particularly heinous event, somehow even scouted herself an agent. Suddenly Tibbie, who had never so much as set foot on a stage in high school, was landing commercials and print work. Still, it made sense. For as long as she could remember Tibbie had been allowing herself to slip away with her imagination. And she had become awfully good at pretending. The acting bug bit and suddenly Tibbie wasn't attending auditions to humbly brag about them later but because they were fun and dangerous and gave her that rush of flying she had become dependent on to feel like she was living. Plus it helped that the falling (or losing out on a role) was a much softer landing than asphalt.

Her first real role was on television as Macy Misa on the Disney Channel show, JONAS. It wasn't the lead she had auditioned for but somehow having a consolation part written just for her seemed even better. Though the show was from from a critic gem, it was fun and Tibbie allowed for herself to get immersed in a world of what if's. What if she continued acting? What if she were in movies? What if she were to become famous? What if she was able to find an audience of people that really listened to her? (For as the daughter of a mother that was more idea than reality and the botched first attempt of a man's goal to have a family, Tibbie didn't often feel as if anyone, anyone not Noah, was really listening).

After graduation, Tibbie decided not to try and pursue a career in anthropology (a shame, really, with how many job opportunities there are available in such a field) but instead to continue acting. Roles were not the best she could imagine but still, Tibbie was determinedly kicking her way into Hollywood. And, as luck would have it, her kicking worked when she landed the role of Raven Reyes on a little CW show called The 100.

While The 100 was hardly a show poised to vault its actors into stardom, Tibbie fell in love with the show with an aching immediacy. Aching because of the constant danger of cancellation, the distance of filming in Canada, and with the urgency Tibbie felt to be accepted into the cast and crew as family. It was only after the first season and a boost from a guest role to a series regular that Tibbie began to relax into the idea of permanence - something a lack of experience has not yet allowed for her to see as naive. Instead this comfort made her remember a few of her other if's.

Following the first season of the show, Tibbie began a blog (shoutout here to Noah who designed the website for the small price of freshly baked peanut butter cookies) and began to attempt to build herself as a social media presence. The blog, full of flowery poetry (not very good), pontificating purple prose (too contrived to read as genuine), and kitschy how-to's (which are, actually, sometimes alright if not taken seriously), is indulgent in a way that has garnered her a following of internet (read as: Tumblr) users that read John Green novels obsessively and simultaneously swear to destroy the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope while being her.