The other one's guy friend

fic. This is a character 'flow' of one of the characters from appointments & disappointments.

I was four. It's the first memory I have of going in to my father's shop. We were a small grocery store then, my father stayed in the counter all day long, handing people soaps and shampoo. He made me hand things to the customer. This is all yours, he told me, and you need to prepare to be good at it. I would be in the shop for every day thereafter, doing my assignments, listening to radio and songs, talking to my friends on the phone, even if I wasn't working.

From that point onward, every living moment of my life was about planning our expansion, the business, and how I'd take it beyond my dad's wildest wishes. You will take this to three and beyond, to other countries, we will become like all the big companies you see in the billboards. We will compete with the big chains, my dad said, as we opened our second shop two streets from the original. I was seven.

I was nine. My mom told me if I wanted to help dad and her in the house, with the business, and be a good son, i'd need to marry someone they wanted me to marry when I got older. She told me about all the girls I hung out with, and how I needed to be considerate about how I interacted with them. It affects not just you, but us too, you know she said.

I didn't understand what was happening, or why she was telling me these things, or the full impact of thoe words, but I cried a lot. I cried and cried and cried. Your happiness is more important than whatever we expect from you, and if you're happy we're happy, she said.. Whoever you marry will be fine by me, and I'll convince the rest of the family, she told me. Don't marry someone who does drugs, or who comes from a bad family with bad parents, my mother said to me. My mother told me I could be with anyone I wanted. I was eleven.

I was twelve. For the first time in my life, there was a life beyond my household for me. I made a small group of very loyal friends, three of them were girls. We were young, we were boring, and we nerdy. Our hangouts consisted of us playing computer games, talking about stars and universe and evolution and superheros and how our gods must have been the superheroes of their times. My mom was in the shops a increasingly often those days, and sent us cokes and snacks when I hung with my friends. They loved her.

My mother became a much happier woman since auntie started living with us, that's the love of the family, my dad explained to me. She didn't like my dad very much, and my father seemed to be afraid of her, he would avoid making small conversations with her. Auntie helped us around in the house, in the shop, helped my sister and I prepare for school and tutored us. She was younger than mother by several years, she's like a younger sister to me, she told my dad and I once. She had gone through some tough times in her life, and had no other place to go, my mother explained to me. A good friend or sister, a friend-sister, a 'meetini' of my mother came to live with us. I was fourteen.

I was sixteen. Our group of friends played the bottle-spinning game in Pokhara, we were all a little drunk. Nothing serious happened, but a girl smooched me on the cheeks, and the girls talked about many kind of things I thought they'd be embarrassed about or grossed by. Something happened inside me, it made me all warm, and my stomach started hurting. I liked how it felt, there was a sense that something was lacking, that I was incomplete. I didn't enjoy that sensation.

We were inseparable after that. She smooched me on my lips, they were shut tight. Then one day she asked me if we were just friends or what, and I said I'd like her to be my girlfriend. We talked to each other more than to anyone else, and it was clear to everyone we were going to s place where we'd be more than friends. It wasn't very dramatic or anything. The girl who had kissed me in Pokhara and I started dating. I was seventeen.

I was eighteen. My best friend, a girl, and I were playing truth and dare. My girlfriend and I had recently broken up because we didn't know what it meant to me girlfriend and boyfriend and it was just so weird. We were much better as friends. My friend was helping me figure through my feelings. We were playing truth and dare, we were so bored, just the two of us. We were in her room, she dared me to cup her breasts, I was no chicken. I wasn't sexually attracted to her at all. I had sex for the first time, without any condoms or anything, I was very stressed for weeks after. We barely had sex, truth be told. The knot in my stomach that had tied itself two years before seemed to be untied. We started dating, my ex didn't mind, it was my first adult relationship.