A new writer I discovered through Brianna Wu’s new blog Cosmodrome. Maddy Myers writes about her experience growing up.
I met Katie in elementary school. I was in fourth grade, she was in fifth, and we both attended the same after-school program. We invented a role-playing game together based on the tabletop games that our male friends played. We liked Magic: The Gathering and Dungeon & Dragons for the pictures and the aesthetic, but we both wanted more freedom. So Katie and I made up our own game, which I now realize was a live-action role-playing game.
It was no whimsical game of Calvinball, either; we were aged 9 and 10, so we were old enough to impose structure and canon and continuing story-lines.
We were married, in the game. Of course, Katie was role-playing as a man, and I was role-playing as a woman, so later in life, I ret-conned this experience in my head as “straight.” But deep down I know that the person I had feelings for was Katie, not her character.