By Medular Sinclair.

I remember hearing that sound first. That aural delight of two bodies in rhythm. Panted gasps, with a hint of slush.

I opened my eyes. The silence fell on me like a drunk in a park. Until the dream wilted, I was that six-year-old girl, living in that small house with the paper-thin walls.

There is this line of you stretching out through the past. Sometimes we forget those at the farthest end behind us. That little girl in dungarees, with pink bands holding her little pig tails putting her hand up to answer every question the teacher posed. That girl being wrong more times than she was right.

Did that matter? Not to her.

The six-year-old had no inhibition. Nothing to prove to anyone.

Staring in the mirror at the line behind me, I can see far in the distance the one jumping up and down, bouncing from one leg to another. The studious girl, trying to attain the attention of the boy from the football team.

He did not see the girl with the perfect uniform. The one afraid that her background, the house she lived in, would get her kicked out of school. Only Debs saw her. Debs had the thick glasses, the greasy hair, but she appreciated her smart brain, and her soft looks.

That girl is the last one before I became me.

The recognisable me anyway. The bridge between childhood and adulthood.

I never kissed the boy from the football team. Deb did. I am going to assume she did. We heard of the party in the Witches pub and Debs and I crashed it. We sat for a while ignoring those from school as a defiant act of not invited us. They did not care.

She disappeared and I went looking. I found her, bent over a bin and the player was pulling her hips onto him. Annoyed, I walked back to my home estate. How could she betray me, how could he betray me. By the time I made it back to the estate I changed my mind.

Simon helped me. His family lived on our street. I had always found him pleasant in both looks and attitude. But he would have been eighteen, or nineteen, at the time. He was strong enough to hold me up against the garage wall and took what I wanted to give.

As I sit at the table in my conservatory with a pot of tea, a little marmalade on toast for breakfast. Staring at the winter sun melting the frost from my lawn, another year nearly completed.

My laptop is open, and I am trying to answer the question: Who are you?

I am the girl woken by the sex of my parents. I am the girl eager to learn. I am the teenager desperately searching for a way to fit in.

Stretched out behind are all those incarnations of me.

Frightened, insecure, imposter, hidden behind the confident, social, successful me. Only to find myself happily alone, relaxed, sipping tea and taking a bite of lightly toasted bread with a thick layer of marmalade.

Who am I?

I have no idea.

---