One such person was my friend Steve. He fit into both categories. I first met him when I was about five years old. My family and I used to live on Churchill Drive near the border of Madison and Fitchburg. There were a lot of kids in the neighborhood, and it was ideal for trick-or-treating, so much that I would come back for Halloween even years after we moved away. Steve, a few others and I would often play together around our duplexes or inside of each other's homes. I actually knocked on Steve’s door for trick-or-treating one year, but he had a hard time remembering me, no doubt because I was all dressed up and you couldn’t see my face. A few years later we were reunited at a mutual friend’s birthday party. He only invited us two, and I recognized him right away. He still had a lot of trouble remembering me, but over time he remembered a few things about the old days.

Steve and I became very good friends. We had a nearly identical sense of humor, which was a relief to me because I would often laugh when nobody else was laughing, or not laugh at what everyone else thought was funny. We would laugh for hours about the silliest things, and play video games endlessly. Sometimes we would walk around town in places like the mall or State Street and test out some very uncommon abilities he and I both began to discover we had at the same time somehow. Despite appearances, we were like twins in a way. I’m pretty sure we even had the same dream on the same night once. The way he described it was exactly the same as what I saw, except for one difference. We both saw a young woman in a pool of water, and we were both afraid to jump in because we thought it was too shallow, but she assured us both that it was OK. The only difference was that in my dream, it was an actual indoor swimming pool. In his dream, it was more like a small pond. Everything else was identical. Pretty amazing, I thought.

Steve was one of the only people I could rely on in this very uncertain time in my life when reality seemed to be rewriting itself, both according to what I thought, and according to ageless truths that had suddenly begun to reveal themselves to me and dissolve everything I once thought was true about the world but were mere illusions or lies that have been in circulation for a long time. It seemed like the impossible was becoming possible. The only problem with that is, to the untrained mind, sometimes the darkness that hides within the deepest trenches of our psyches can also become possible.

Steve was pretty heavily into anime. He had a small collection of anime series and posters hanging up in his bedroom as well as some models. The one that he seemed to be most excited about was one called “Neon Genesis Evangelion.” It was a lengthy series that aired in Japan in the late 90’s about future Tokyo and three teenagers who were tasked with saving humanity. They were chosen because they all possessed the ability to sync with basically a living mecha that was combat equipped to fight against giant invaders called Angels, who were trying to create a cataclysmic event known as “The Third Impact,” which would end all humanity.

The story was quite complex, and the series ended with a two-part movie which set off a nuclear explosion of thoughts in my mind and the resulting emotions that accompanied those thoughts. The creator of the series was said to be depressed and in a state of emotional turmoil when he was working on it, and it showed! There were various themes about life, death, religion, and relationships that didn’t regularly inspire hope, but took you deeper down into a world of misery and suffering at the hands of life itself, like existence was just a cruel joke. It was very psychological and powerful, in both clearly visible and subtle ways.

Through all the emotional turbulence, I was able to find admiration for one of the main characters. Asuka was the name of one of the three teenagers. She was always overconfident, sassy, and took the initiative in situations. She was the bravest out of the three, which may have just been a front for some kind of insecurity she had.

“It would be cool to meet someone like her,” I thought.

Nobody ever told me how easily thoughts can become things.

As I carried on with my life, I started to get the feeling that there really was someone like her, and that I could meet her somehow. I didn’t always understand where these feelings I had came from, but they were hard to ignore. They would just happen. There was one particular area in Madison where I would always get this feeling. Maybe my mind was just childish, or was there something else behind it?

In late ‘99, Steve invited me to an anime club that was started up by students at his school. He was a student at West High School, and a year behind me. I decided to go because the few anime series that Steve showed me seemed very deep and imaginative — Preeminent storytelling.

The Anime Club was being held at a young man named Griffin’s house on South Shore Drive in Madison. I went there with Steve one night and there were at least half a dozen other people there. Griffin was there, of course, along with his girlfriend Megan. There were also two boys named Jake, one of which Steve had already told me about, a boy named Don, another boy named Joel, a girl named Kathy, and a couple others. These were not the popular kids in school, but neither was I, so we were basically on even ground.

I started out pretty quiet, as I sometimes do to get a feel for the situation before I start to open up. The others knew each other at least fairly well, so I was definitely the newcomer to the group. We watched anime after anime for several hours with everyone’s various criticisms and comments. The way Griffin laughed was hilarious. Most of the time he was pretty chill and maybe a bit emo, as some people would say. When he laughed, he sounded like someone who was doing a fake laugh as loud as they could, but that was his real laugh! His voice also got much more high-pitched when he laughed. Just him laughing was enough to make me laugh every time. Griffin’s orange-furred cat, nicknamed “The Biggness” would often get down off of tables and come up to people to get pet. This seemed like an alright group. They might not be people I would seek out for friendship, but we got along well enough, and our mutual interest in anime was enough to hold us together. The only thing I was uncertain about was sometimes Megan would turn her head towards me and just stare at me for about ten seconds each time while everyone else was focused on whatever anime we were watching, and I’d stare right back. I never knew why she kept doing that. I didn’t know what kind of thought was behind it.