Odds at Ends.

Charlotte and me.

6.

Charlotte and me.

My mother told me that if I’d been born a girl, she would have named me Charlotte. It is a name I have loved ever since. I was born in South Australia in 1989, as a decade of bright lights and color died in the cynicism of the 1990’s. I used to play with a Barbie Car alongside my Star Wars action figures. The games I played saw love stories unfolding in heartache and romance, while my friends’ toys gave their lives in a blaze of bloody, if somewhat imaginary glory. My hands were soft, and people said I had a soft, young face. I was mistaken for a girl when I was three and four, and as I grew older, I would sometimes stare into my own eyes in the bathroom and try to imagine they were situated in a different body.

In the small country town where my first memories begin (for some reason, I can never recall anything prior to this), my brothers would work in the factories owned by the Plymouth Brethren. I was the middle child, and I loved to draw, to create, and often to be alone. I can remember blue skies and golden fields of Canola, and riding down Main Street on my second hand pink bicycle.

When some of my younger brothers’ friends called me a girl for riding a pink bike, I lifted that two wheeled diva off the ground and tried to throw it onto the trampoline where they were playing, hoping to trip them up. Thankfully, I didn’t manage it. I doubt my parents would have looked kindly on such an act of violence.