Lucky Girl

clara otto

During a driving lesson, my aunt told me that growing up my mother always had a boyfriend. Hungover, I maneuvered the car through the winding roads of my hometown.

My aunt was the oldest, my mother the middle child. My aunt a softball player, my mother a gymnast. My aunt a redhead, my mother a brunette.

Before it got bad, people said my mother was the life of the party, the life of any party.

I inherited this from her and then disavowed it.

I arrange rows of pink objects on my desk: a glass candle holder, lip gloss, two flower-shaped hair clips, a tin of translucent powder, a single earring shaped like a cat, a mechanical keyboard, and a matching mouse.

For most of my adult life, I have understood myself as the object of desire rather than the subject.

Amelia talks about Transgender History, about how Susan Stryker writes about the power of being the object, of how this is related to claiming otherhood.

Lucky girl syndrome is the latest interpretation of the “law of assumption.” It’s the idea that when we act as though what we want is already our reality – and believe it – then we are rewarded with the things we most desire in life.

Pink textures: bumpy, dull, sharp, scratchy, sandy, silky.

Before going to a Taylor Swift-themed night at a club, I joke that I have to be non-monogamous because I’m such a slut. A friend gasps and then says, Don’t call yourself that.

Romantically, I have loved two people. Platonically, I have loved fourteen.

I have been lucky.

When I say love I mean soul-shaking.

My mother had a type of beauty that was obvious and I was born my father’s double.

All my life, I have been told I have been lucky, that tragedy builds character.

A video: a woman in a robe walks down a hallway and then jumps on the bed of another woman. The caption: “When I realize I haven’t annoyed my sister with every single thought I have had in the past twenty-four hours.” I consider sending it to Amelia but she doesn’t have Instagram or TikTok and sending a link via text is too much work.

My aunt lost a soul-shaking friendship. They lived down the street from each other. Her friend would ride horses past my aunt’s house and my aunt would pretend not to hear the hoof steps, wouldn’t look out the window.

What if she had?

Shades of pink: baby, ballet, barbie, cotton candy, champagne, orchid.

My mother always told me, “You can choose your friends, not your family.” I chose Amelia outside a hole-in-the-wall bar where they served cocktails in bags in a city known for having beautiful women, hot summers, and excellent plastic surgeons.

When my aunt moved out of the house down the street from her soul-shaker she wasn’t (still isn’t) talking to me or my mother so I don’t know if they reconciled.

Amelia and I met every Thursday night at a café on the second story of an office building. It looked out over the heart of my neighbourhood. We ordered affogatos and I talked about how I hated my job. Neither of us wanted to be like the teachers who had been here for a decade, the people who get trashed at foreigner bars every weekend. A future that only goes in one direction.

We had our hands on the wall, feeling for hinges.

Pink materials: clay, cotton, resin, spandex, porcelain.

From the ages of twelve to eighteen, I was catcalled each time I left the house. Usually by grown men, usually in trucks.

On the internet, the younger generation talks about sleeping with men as an act of self-harm and I think yes. And then maybe the kids will be all right.

As of one week ago, I have slept with as many non-men as I have men. I hate saying non-men, but gender-specificity is such a mouthful.

Like my father, I have a penchant for women with dark hair. Unlike my father, I’m meticulous, detail-oriented, would never set foot on a pair of skis, a snowboard, or an ATV.

Pink is an arbitrary classification of colour meaning that it is just desaturated shades of other colours.

I was born without a lot of choices—poor and girl and worse and small-town and single-mothered and this and that and the rest of it. But I have been lucky. I mean it. I have had more options than any woman in my family has ever had.

My aunt ran a nursery, always had her hands in the earth—claimed her fibromyalgia was cured with evening primrose oil but had trouble remembering the names of the plants she loved.

If you cut the past, what colour does it bleed?

I show Amelia the bite mark on my thigh and she says, “Good work.”

What I like about being an object is the absence of thought. What I like about submission is not having to make a choice. The more responsibility in my life, the more choices I have.

Pink dream: windchimes by the front door, a crab-apple tree in the front yard, brambles of blackberries along the fence.

People who know me now say it’s not luck, but from a young age, I knew to run my hands along the walls, knew the difference between the hinges of a trap and a jib door. How did I know?

When I was leaving for university, my aunt wanted me to take her old plates with me. Heavy ceramic, midnight blue. I didn't have room.

Why all the pink? Why all the sparkles? What use does a kid in the middle of nowhere whose mother is struggling to pay the rent have for porcelain? For pink? The world will say that kid needs to learn to be tough.

I never learned. I fall in love seven times a day.

(Not the soul-shaking kind.)

In her SUV, my aunt said she was surprised I didn't end up an addict and then took me to a used electronics store to buy a laptop that I could take to university. Later, when I turned the computer on, there were still photos of the last owner, an older woman looking into a camera like she wasn’t expecting to see herself. My aunt put her hand on my shoulder as we left the store, told me to always save my receipts.

I think she thought she could save me.

Wrapped in a pink satin house robe, I sit in front of my bedroom mirror and take nudes, adjusting the robe to reveal more thigh, more breast.

Pink body: The skin beneath my fingernails, areolas, labia minora, clitoris, lungs, intestines, brain, bladder. But beyond the biological pink, the pink that matters, the pink that finds pink out in the world, I don’t know where those pinks live. Maybe in the heart—but the heart is usually, unarguably, red (saturated pink).

What use is being saved if there’s no glitter? No sparkles? No pink? What use is being saved if desire becomes a contract?

The door that led out of my hometown wasn’t shiny. It led to places that felt like the wrong direction. At times, I had to double back, make imperfect choices. There were moments of compromise that felt like failure, but all along the way there were friends slipping rhinestones into my pockets, sending sequins in the mail, pushing tulips into my buttonholes.

Pink present: kissing friends hello and goodbye, my cats in the garden stomping through wildflowers, pictures of bruises in a hidden album on my phone (pink in the places where they’re healing), handmade chapbooks annihilated with glitter and scented glue, the road outside the house I rent thick with cherry blossom petals each spring.

about the author

Clara Otto (she/they) is a queer writer living on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Their writing has appeared in The Ex-Puritan, Plenitude Magazine, Foglifter and elsewhere. When not writing, they are scouring thrift stores for pottery and drinking bubble tea. Find them on social media: @claraotto411.