by K. R. Richardson

Created on: November 03, 2008   Last Updated: November 14, 2008

I spent most of my childhood alone. I had a step brother who was much older than me. He had to go to a mental hospital when I was five. He was in and out of them for a while after that. I don't remember all that much of it, but my mother was completely distracted by it during the years that it was going on and she sort of forgot about me. I guess she just assumed Dad would take care of me.

But then my Dad, well, he had this other daughter from his first marriage and she had had a kid a few years back but had refused to stop going out and partying. They were living in a caravan out the back of our house. We lived basically in the middle of nowhere, so she just used to leave for days at a time. She never told anyone when she'd be back or where she was going. The kid was my age, but she hadn't even been properly toilet trained. And then, all that neglect had made her really badly behaved and desperate for attention. So Dad was pretty pre-occupied with trying to take care of her. I guess he just assumed that mum would take care of me.

With everyone assuming that someone else was taking care of me, I ended up slipping through the cracks, so to speak.

I didn't mind so much. I've never really been one to crave attention. But even someone who is naturally introverted eventually begins to feel the weight of all that time alone. And the thing is, even when I was with my parents, I was still alone. They knew I was there, they could see me, they could hear me; they just didn't seem to care. I was always brushed over, pushed to the side, left and forgotten. That's when you really start to feel it. True loneliness. Deep, penetrating and constant. The kind of loneliness that changes people. It can only be tolerated for so long before you get to the point where you have to do something to relieve it. I'm sure there are as many different possible reactions to it as there are people in the world, but for me, as a child of five, I reacted by closing myself off. I developed an imagined world of my own in which I could live happily, with or without other people. I interacted as much as was necessary, but for the most part, I was totally disconnected. In fact, it wasn't until high school that I even made any friends. I hadn't really thought about it before, but for all of primary school, I didn't have one single friend. That's so strange. I didn't even realise. Not one friend. But there was something else...

The primary school I went to was very small and out of the way. We lived about

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