Every smile you fake, every claim you stake

Whether it's because I am a single child who had a busy, rarely home single parent growing up, I entered this "family" phase when I was 15. Almost every girl I met, and with my closest guy friends, I wanted to name our bond "brother" or "sister". I mean, some of my high school mates did this too, and they were quite needy. We eventually had this family tree that didn't exist but in words. We cared about them as youths do. I read Stranger in a Strange Land and was enamoured with the idea of a Water Sister, and I got one. How strange these relationships may have seemed to the girls involved. I feel like I should apologize.

When I was 16, or Grade 10, I went through a drastic change. I abandoned trying to be popular with everyone, I hated being a fob, and I went through the usual rebellion and search for authenticity that most kids do. I was goth in a true spirit - I wanted to be alone, and to find out who I can rely on, if any. I entirely rejected who I was only a year ago.

Then I met the gang. The sequence of events I'm proposing here may be disorganized, so if anyone tells you different, they're probably right. Well, I had met them before through some BBS meets and stuff, but it was at this time that we started to roleplay every weekend. And we started doing other things, of course, like going to concerts (something I don't do anymore), or Swedish fairs. And ever since then they have become the closest people to me (except, of course, for my wife. My mom is a bit different, in the way that our relationships to our mother usually are). But it never occurred to me, until this past birthday when Linda gave me a card with a note that says you'll always be our little brother, that they really are my family. In the wake of the backlash against my tendency to try and create false family ties, real ones had developed. Even though I never thought of it that way, I felt that deeply for them. Another reason may be that I never trusted my acceptance with them, something that I'm not sure I'll ever get over, but something that may not be entirely bad. It certainly keeps me on the best behaviour when they are around!