well, i guess if you've explored this far, you've unlocked the next part of my thrilling backstory.

as i said, i started as an introject. i don't remember exactly when i formed—but i definitely remember where. my elementary school library: its coarse, cheap gray carpet, the brown wooden shelves, the plastic book dividers; the colored dot stickers on the spine of every book, and the laminated pieces of paper hung in several places notating what reading level each dot indicated. and the computer lab, where i would speedrun duck life while my classmates played crazy taxi, or dune buggy, and my best friend would sit next to me and be the only kid playing monkey go happy. (during a standardized test, i learned that all of the computers' passwords were set to 'admin1'. i never did anything with that information.)

i was at an advanced reading level early on in childhood—my mom insists that i had even taught myself to read. and my hyperlexia gave me a wonderful advantage that my classmates didn't have: i could read any story i wanted. and of course i would pick the strange book whose cover opened from the center, spinning a story of a magical world on the other side of the divide.

and so began my introduction to magic. the series became a fast favorite, and i would spend many hours absorbed in those pages. i wondered what it would be like to live amongst the tangle-folk, and i thought about how well my best friend would get along with ironclaw, since they both loved math. i wanted to meet grimspite, and talk to brittlehorns, and make paintings of flame-birds. i suppose my family must have noticed how fixated i was on the books, as i received the trilogy in hardcover for my ninth birthday. it made re-reading the series a lot easier.

in any case, a lot of time has passed, since then. i still hold equal love for both magic and science, and love exploring the technical aspects of things typically dismissed as arcane and unknowable. and i've found myself drawn to people who hold a passion for history, who have kindness and wit to match, and those whose hair naturally falls in ringlets and curls... but other than that, i guess i've diverged from who i used to be. kind of like felix, i guess.

maybe we're more alike than i'd thought.