So where was I? Oh, yes. My childhood. It was filled with knowledge and learning and exploration. You’d think that I was kept hidden from the rest of the world, but that isn’t quite accurate. When I was very, very young, yes. I was sequestered from other children until I was old enough to understand that our family had certain boundaries that we didn’t want crossed, that there were rules for how we interfaced with the outside world. It was shortly after I really came to understand these rules and family policies, all of them drilled into my mind by Father and Mother, that Father passed away suddenly. Illness did not take him; an accident of weather and happenstance did. His death was not gruesome or horrific, as far as I can tell (his funeral WAS close-casketed), but Mother insists that its suddenness took her by surprise.
And so it was that my mother, now a heartbroken widow, resolved to ensure that I would receive the education that Father could not supply directly. With his lessons in how to comport myself firmly seated in my young and impressionable mind, Mother saw to it that I attended school in the city. She had warned me that it was a different world out there, a lot more complex than the one I knew at home, but that I would always be safe there and a watchful eye would be kept upon me at all times, unseen but vigilant. While growing up, I was uncertain of how she arranged this, but I can attest to it: not once was I harassed or troubled by bullies or troublemakers, even though, as the archetypal “new kid”, I should have been by all rights. I saw other kids receive their fair share of headaches from such characters, but whenever they caught sight of me, they always mysteriously turned away as though just being in close proximity to me might somehow cause them to melt in agony. The resentment in their eyes when they saw me was obvious and worrisome, but they never acted upon it. I once mentioned it to Mother and she simply nodded approvingly, as though it was exactly as it should be. Having seen what some of those other kids had to endure, I did not rail against the mysterious protection- “never look a gift horse in the mouth”, after all. My early years in school were lonely, sure, but they were also blessedly absent of scars or unwanted fights. I think that if the protection hadn’t been there I might have made more friends and had a more normal experience around other kids, but I didn’t come to that realization until much later in life. Don’t get me wrong- I wasn’t a total pariah; I DID have a few friends growing up, but there was always a sort of distance between us and I sometimes found myself giving them a good bit of misdirection about my family life due to the rules I had to follow. But, all in all, I suppose that it could have been worse. I never outright lied to my friends (Father had taught me that telling only part of the truth or wording the truth in specific ways was always preferable to telling lies whenever possible), but I always felt alone in keeping my family’s identity so secret.
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