Livre d'Or

I don't think the common foundation community part is critical, but as someone who has trouble forming close friendships outside of structured communities, church and residential college were pretty important like that. I *could* have met kayloulee online, actually, but I was in non-fic-writing LOTR fandom and she was in Harry Potter fic fandom. I bet we had common friends, but we didn't find each other.

I hesitate to give school credit for being the foundation of my friendship with C.M, though, because school friendships were so universally difficult for me. Even that one, in its early stage, was characterised by boundary-crossing, discomfort, and some cruelty on both sides. We were, however, part of a mixed-age group of people at the far end of a long bus ride, and part of a distinct subset of people in my grade who took drama in the middle grades of high school. I think our friendship only became familial after he left school, though, and my mother had as much to do with that as anyone else. She had pretty strong maternal instincts toward C.M., which gave me a strong alternative to the idea that so many other people (including his family) had that we ought to date.