I’ve always had an outsider’s view of the world. One eye navigating the drama from within it and the other like an observation channel through which something indescribable peers, something that feels more like the real me… something feminine or maybe just alien.

As a child eye didn’t feel like the boy I was supposed to be. You could call it gender dysphoria but to me it was more mysterious. Eye did not inhabit the boy that they saw in the space I was occupying. Nobody seemed to notice, nobody but eye. What was offered seemed intended for someone else and I never took it without feeling like a thief. It was a case of mistaken identity. Eye couldn’t grasp the situation. Eye was present to myself but absent to others, Eye sensed I was not real for them, out of place and somewhere else… somewhere in the gaps between where the real things were. Eye watched events unfold, uneasily, from there.

Made by two people who were worlds apart, in a place that neither of them were from and after they had separated from each other. It was a decaying situation about which little explanation was offered. I was fed, clothed, sheltered, sometimes comforted but never encountered. I fell into many gaps. A Cornish lightening storm is my earliest memory.

At four I fell through another kind of gap. On a sunny Mediterranean beach something strange began gathering in the atmosphere around me. I stepped into the shallows and lay down in a bubble of warm water and was cast off.

The world quietly ended for me right there and then. Or so eye thought…

To be continued… possibly.