Writing Prompts: What Did You Look Like At Age 5?
I assume I was a weird looking kid. I don’t remember for sure, but that would seem right. I should be the kind of person who looked weird as a kid, if only so it matched the way I generally felt around people. Weird looking avoids any undue and unbearable pressure that might seep up from my childhood and mug me as an adult. At five, if I can trust my memory, my family lived up in the northern parts of Queensland. Family lore suggests I already was pretty weird – telling pre-school teachers about imaginary pets, a menagerie of dogs and seals and mice that got treated like there were something real. I remember living next to the school where my dad worked, remember playing G-Force in the yard around our house. I remember someone finding the abandoned skins of carpet snakes beneath our house, in the days before such things would have sent me into spasms of ophidiaphobic paranoia