Our past relationships mean a lot to who we are today. It is upon mulling over such a simple and obvious sentiment that I realized that I never really understood that concept and hardly started cultivating my family relationships until I was 30. I’ve always been an idiosyncratic blip within the harmony of my family. I’m a track that gets skipped and would never make the greatest hits, the Ringo to their The Beatles. Or at least that is how it feels. So while I don’t take complete responsibility for the strained string of “relationships” that semi-survived my more than quarter of a century on Earth (I was the child in most instances, to be fair), I’ve accepted this, and so find family elsewhere. It feels like I’m an alien when we share a table, an alien with my own unique spectral sensory organs unique from their species. So they stopped inviting me to holidays, and I saw them less and less often. I’ve spent most of my life by this point orbiting them from a distance relative to Neptune to the Sun. It’s in this way that I’ve come to realize that I’m most like Pluto; never actually a planet in their Solar System, at all.

Paige Six | 12.1.20