I grew up ten minutes outside the school district.
Ten minutes isn’t far unless you’re a kid.
Then it might as well be another state.
My mom sent me to that school because they had good computers. Macs, back when that was enough to make a public school seem futuristic. She knew I was left-handed. She knew I spent most of my free time playing video games. She figured the computers mattered.
She was probably right.
I don’t know what I would’ve become without them.
Still, living outside the district meant I wasn’t part of the neighborhood everyone else shared. I didn’t ride my bike past their houses. I wasn’t around when someone knocked on a door and three kids disappeared together until dinner.
I went to school with them.
Then I went home.
Video games call the place where you first appear your spawn point.
Mine was a house on a street that didn’t connect to much. A bedroom with a computer. A lot of time alone.
Nothing terrible happened there. That almost makes it harder to explain.
I wasn’t bullied. I wasn’t invisible. I had friends.
I was just adjacent.
Close enough to be included. Far enough to know inclusion could end when the school day did.
You learn things from growing up slightly outside.
You notice who belongs without having to earn it. You notice how groups form and how quickly they close behind someone. You learn to read a room before deciding what version of yourself might survive in it.
Mostly, you become good at watching.
Maybe that’s why the new kids kept finding me.
Whenever someone unfamiliar appeared at school, they somehow ended up talking to me first. I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t volunteering for the position. I think they could just tell I knew what it felt like to be there without being part of there yet.
I could sit beside someone in that strange middle space.
I still can.
For a long time, I thought this was just part of my personality. That I was naturally observant. Independent. Better one-on-one than inside a group.
Maybe some of that is true.
But personality is sometimes just what we call the shape we had to take early.
I learned how to belong temporarily. How to become useful. How to make people feel understood without asking them to understand too much about me.
That skill has followed me into almost every room I’ve entered since.
So has the suspicion that I’m one step away from no longer being needed.
I don’t go back to that street much. There isn’t much reason to. The house looks smaller now. The road still ends where it always did. The school probably threw out those Macs twenty years ago.
But I think about the kid in that bedroom sometimes.
He’s sitting in front of the computer, starting another game. Building another world because the one outside his window feels close but unavailable.
I wonder what he would think of me now.
He’d probably be confused by some of it. Proud of a few things. Horrified by my sleep schedule.
Mostly, I think he’d be relieved.
I didn’t spend my life begging to be let inside.
I found something useful to do with the view from the edge.
Maybe that’s what a spawn point really is. Not only where you begin, but where you first learn what the world expects from you.
Some people begin inside a place that already has room for them.
Others spend years trying to escape the place that taught them to disappear.
Mine was somewhere in between.
A decent house. A dead-end street. A school ten minutes away.
Just enough distance to turn me into someone who notices the person standing outside the circle.
You can leave the place where you started.
But sometimes you still enter every room like you’ll have to leave when the bell rings.
More Thursday.
// Scorpio Veil
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