meet charlie (entry 01)

hi everyone, my name is charlie (rhymes with barley) & it is a pleasure to meet you all !

i study arts at the university of melbourne and i take classes in media, philosophy & politics- even though i have no idea about any of them. i’m here to learn not excel, so i think i’m okay with being a little bit lost right now.

i live in the suburb of caroline springs, which homes about 25 thousand people. one of those 25 thousand is my girlfriend, a couple of them are my friends & even more of them are people i love, or have loved at some point in my life. the travel time from home to university is about an hour, maybe an hour and a half; which i am definitely not going to complain about. when i’m on the train, i like to read or play games on my phone, or put on a whimsical playlist and look out the windows longingly (like every girl does).

i am 18 years old. i was born in june of 2006 to a loving mother & father, who already had a young child at home. i’m a gemini, but im not sure how i feel about those sort of things. i do love to look at the stars though. i read my horoscope sometimes, if it pops up, but mainly i like to see the things they say about the people i love & try to figure out if its true or not.

i love to collect things. i junk journal, not aesthetically or anything, but i think it still counts. i love collecting photos and trinkets, and displaying them sporadically around my little room. i like to collect business cards from places or people that i visit, pokémon cards, soda tabs, books, games and scraps of yarn or fabric. i like to keep things physically, i like to be able to feel & look back on things that i have gathered. if you ask my mum, i hold on to too much, but i think it’s just enough.

my house is brick with a red drive way. the roof has a hole in it from where a mother bird made a nest for her babies- they are my upstairs neighbours. i live with my mum & dad, along with my brother, i have a cat and a dog, and sometimes my girlfriend stays for a while too. my room is decorated to the brim with love, underneath the current white paint are shades of pink and teal from when i was a girl. there are no ghosts in my house, but there are memories- handprints on walls and scratches on furniture and thousands upon thousands of photos.

i work at a supermarket 3 days a week and i have for about 4 years. i slice up meet for sandwiches, sell salmon for sushi or chicken for curry. sometimes i get to put the little yellow discount tickets on the products at 2 o’clock and move them to a little shelf in the front of the store so they can be heavily judged by customers and passerbys.

my favourite movie is juno, my favourite artist is adrianne lenker, my favourite book is my neighbour totoro: the novel & my favourite emotion is love. i am approximately 168 centimeters tall, i have a scar on my knee from when i fell riding my first (and only) bike, my hair and eyes are the same colour of brown as my mothers at my age & my skin is sensitive to the sun just like my father.

im excited to keep writing on this blog, to have a trail of my thoughts & feelings during my time at university. i hope you enjoyed this first piece, thank you for reading and thank you for meeting me.

lots of love, charlie.