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 (even now, I swear, I’m shuddering at the thought). I remember this weird separator wall between the living room and the dining room, or maybe I’m just imagining it. It’s the place we lived when I first heard Joe Dolce’s Shut Uppa You Face, and at five that song is the shiznit.

I remember the house vaguely, but it’s usually distorted. It’s been the setting for nightmare after nightmare over the years. Some of them have been transformed into stories.

I remember things about living there, but I don’t remember what I looked like.

It’s not surprising really: I was five. What did I care? It’d be a decade before I realised that there was actually a reason to pay attention to the face you presented to the world, another decade after that before I became comfortable with the face I’d assembled for myself.

But I assume I was a weird looking kid. It’s the thing that would make the most sense.

Expository Note: I’m still recovering from the last of my throat infection, so I’m spending the next couple of weeks tackling some writing prompts I found on the internet. Partially I’m interested in seeing what comes out of it, since I’ve never really been a follow-the-writing-prompts kind of guy. Partially I’m just looking to take the thought of blogging for a stretch while I rebuild my enthusiasm for the task and get back into the routine of not-blog-writing. Partially I just figured it’d be far more interesting than another week of youtube clips.

And partially, lets be honest, it’s ’cause topics like these always seem to freak out my parents a little. I’m not sure why, but I’ll take it – I’m easily amused that way.