I’ve always been somewhat of a loner, whether on purpose or by accident. It started when I was younger. I moved around a lot. I was born in California and lived there for one year, then moved to Kentucky and lived there for two years, then to Florida and lived there for another two years, then to Pennsylvania and lived there for five years, then back to Florida for three years before I moved back to California. If you add it up, it equals thirteen years. By the eighth grade, I’d lived in six cities, and that isn’t counting the many homes I moved into in those cities, so I never felt a firm grounding and never built solid friendships.

I would play alone in the backyard with a tennis ball or a football or a frisbee when my parents were at work. Most days after school, I wouldn’t have a sitter. I played imaginary baseball against a wall by throwing a tennis ball at a chalked-up strike zone beneath a steel pipe. If the ball hit the pipe, it would either fly through the air or roll across the lawn. I would field it and throw it at a tree for a first baseman to call it an out. This helped me practice for Little League because my father wasn’t around.

I also spent time alone in my bedroom, listening to cassettes and playing with action figures, pretending, pretending, pretending. Or Mom would let me roam the mall alone when she was shopping for clothes. I would lose myself in the record store for the cassettes with the coolest covers. If I was with someone, it would’ve been the same thing. They would’ve wanted to go to the arcade. And I did have friends who went to the mall with me. They would get bored in the record store, and I would want to stay in there.

“I’ll meet you at the arcade,” I would say.

And they would be there for a while.

I remember in the eighth grade, my friend Jonathan and I went to the mall, and an adult started following us. We hid in the racks of a Macy’s so the man wouldn’t find us, unsure what he was capable of. The only danger at the mall was the threat of being abducted, but I usually didn’t worry about that. I was too engrossed in the cassettes.

It wasn’t as much about the music but more about the album covers. I remember I bought every tape by Iron Maiden because the album covers were so sweet. The music wasn’t all that special. The same went with AC/DC. Their music was okay, but their album covers allured me. I bought all their cassettes with the allowance my mother gave me. She would get upset because I was wasting money on those stupid cassettes rather than saving up for something better. I didn’t know what she meant by “better.” She never told me. I don’t think she knew either. But I bought what I wanted to buy, and I would listen to those cassettes every day after school. They wouldn’t allow me to bring my Walkman onto the campus.

I still consider myself a latchkey child. The only difference is that I’m an adult who comes home to an empty apartment and gets lost in his own world. I haven’t changed much since adolescence, and that’s fine. In my view, most people don’t. I run into old friends, and they’re the same. They were latchkey children, too. We were fortunate. Who wanted to come home from school to the same old parents every day? No privacy. I needed that solitude after dealing with kids and teachers all morning.