Marco

Marco is the kind of friend everybody wish to have. The best of kind. He is loyal to a fault, protective, supportive, curious and intelligent. We have known each other for years and he certainly knows me better than anyone else. If something terrible had happened in my childhood, together we could figure it out.

Being the caring person that he is, I wasn’t surprised to see him rushed over to my place the moment we hung up the phone. My distressed call had done its toll. From there, it took no time at all for us to get absorbed into the matter at hand. Actually, that’s not exactly how it happened. First we made it to a nice little Italian café, ordered a couple of steaming hot cappuccinos; it was after all a rather cold day of January, and sat at a small round table located just besides a colossal marble of Michelangelo’s David and then, we began. Having David’s private parts hanging in my face was a rather witty introduction to the subject.

It’s all a little insane when you stop to think about it. My family at large and all its members have always had strained rapports and interactions with one another. Enmity has existed between us for as long as I can remember. The antagonism was so bad; we could not even eat all sitting together at the same table. The rare conversations or rather exchange of sounds or grunts were more than just harsh insulting language, it was loaded with vitriol. Yet, from the neighbors’ perspective, we appeared to be a nice little family like all the others. And as long as they thought us to be normal, we ought to be. My mother was all about appearances.

Both Marco and I were quite aware that based on the raw material we had to work with; we could easily come up with just about any arguments supporting a probable conclusion that some sexual abuse might had taken place in my childhood, or that I had been relocated by alien forces into a micro disfunctional environment for research purposes. Truly anything was possible. I had always felt so out of place amongst them. In fact, for the longest time, I was convinced that I had to have been adopted. There was no way these people could be in any way related to me. We had nothing what-so-ever in common, except perhaps aversion.

Therefore, the idea here was not so much for us to attempt proving or disproving the likelihood, rather to analyze the possibility with an open mind. Given how shaken I had been at the idea, we thought something was afoot.