I live with my sister - let me clarify.
I live with one of the sibling group whose house I grew up in. She has no idea who I am and has no legal relationship to me. I do this because this sister (for lack of a better term) is one of those people who lives with eight roommates and a rotating cast of guests in a big house, and they can all figure I am someone else's visitor. Over and over again they figure this. If they were at any risk of noticing that I've lived here for seven years, then we would have different problems.
The giant-confusing-houseful-of-friends situation works well for me now that I'm twenty-something. With kids, even if you have located enough brothers and sisters living under a rich enough paterfamilias who have enough friends with children of their own, there are some limitations to the supposition that your spouse authorized a sleepover. Or that your brother has a friend from Cub Scouts or something over who was never introduced properly. Or that you probably agreed to babysit and forgot that you did this and must not admit in anyone's hearing that you can't tell babies apart and don't recognize which one this is. My condition complicates any matter that touches a bureaucracy, especially, and it takes practice to know how to touch those on one's own behalf.
I don't think it was my original family, and not just because I look nothing like them. I think I must have been passed around a lot. It must, given my survival, be the case that if someone comes into possession of an infant whose parents they can't recall accepting a handoff from, they'll tend to feed it, presumably even buying formula and diapers to ride out the temporary situation as necessary. But I would have been so easy to mix up at a well-attended picnic, so tempting to drop off at a fire station, so trivially abandoned in a daycare that someone stuffed me in so they could go to work and figure out where I was supposed to be in a later that never came. Maybe I was adopted twenty times, although I have some loose idea of how old I might be and I've checked the news from those couple of years and found no suspicious rash of alarm about what might have been me. (I'd be a little hard to notice, but if I were left at the fire station enough times, I don't actually disappear from records - they might observe the number, if not the fact that I was a rerun, and they'd wonder what had so many baby boys rejected by their mothers like undersized kittens in this one town. Though maybe I give investigative journalism too much credit.)
Anyway, I survived things like having to figure out on my own that vaccinations are desirable. I learned the scripts for carefully speaking to one parent when the other was out of the room about how it turned out, over and over, day after day, that they were supposed to be the ones taking me to school. I got my brother (for lack of a better word) to forge "my mother's" scribbled signature on field trip forms (on the principle of the thing; he would have done this for anyone), because once the school had an idea someone existed it'd spit out the paperwork even though the typical teacher appeared embarrassed to have forgotten about their extra student or else was irritated at my imagined attendance record. I turned up at mealtimes and made it awkward not to feed me and even eventually stopped solemnly "reminding" my hosts that I was allergic to spinach; over the years, the meal planning expanded to account for how much food disappeared when "the kids" were home, even if no one could remember that I preferred dinosaur nuggets over pizza. I grew up. I was in the middle of a pack of kids and it became much harder to coast this way once some of them started moving out, so I moved in with my sister.
I couldn't finagle college, even though that's what she was doing when I showed up here. My academic transcript was Swiss cheese. Paper doesn't forget me, computers don't, but at any step where someone needs to have me in mind as a persistent individual I can disappear, and it's people who write things down. They'll read off the name I was telling people I had when I was in kindergarten, with a characteristic facial expression because that name was Elmo Dragon (I no longer introduce myself as Elmo Dragon) while taking attendance, and then as likely as not fail to make a checkmark when I say "present", and then Elmo Dragon has missed quite a lot of school, hasn't he. They forget to grade my exams, or forget that I did a science fair project out of what I could scavenge from the arts and crafts cupboard, and absolutely never give me participation points. The system would assign me remedial work and I would of course not be kicked out of the class I preferred to attend when I turned up there, even if this meant scavenging a spare chair from a nearby room every single day, but that just meant I didn't get credit for either. A public school assumes a kid of the right age belongs in there somewhere even if the record is messy, and will award a diploma to any name on the books, to avoid embarrassment. It probably helped that I was willing to act hurt that they didn't recognize me. A college - well, I could audit courses, but with no degree in the cards I didn't usually bother.
My name in the payroll system for the warehouse I work at is Skip Bailey. Skip because, well. I think it's funny even though nobody else can connect the dots enough to laugh. Bailey's the family name, but I avoid claiming it near my sister, since she'll remark on the coincidence, every time. I think the warehouse would probably keep paying me if I appeared only to clock in and clock out, but I work some most days. It's something to do and also I'd like to know in advance if it's going to close down or change management or something since I might have to respond to that.
Anyway.
My girlfriend.
For lack of a better term.
Many people, if you crash in their bed, will assume that you do not belong there and act accordingly. Not even just if the first guess is that you're there for sex reasons; I had this problem by the time I was about eight and it stopped being cute that somebody's playdate had crashed in somebody's bed in borrowed pajamas, and after that I was full time on the couch. But there's a scatterbrained strain who'll assume that you are their unmemorable hookup from last night and, if they like the look of you, will go for a round two and produce a perfectly licit if forgettable invitation to stay for breakfast. (Not that I have any qualms about helping myself to breakfast without one. I don't have a way to help pay rent, so instead I do most of the grocery shopping and everyone assumes someone else is keeping us in eggs and ramen.)
My girlfriend likes the look of me. I can sleep in her bed every night, and apart from my having to move over if she also likes the look of some other guy she meets while she's out, this works well for me. She's been living with my sister for a year and a half and that's a year and a half I haven't had to subject my back to the sagging sofa. I also like her as a person, though this has less to do with my relationships than I think it does for most people because I mostly see how they treat strangers. I might follow my girlfriend instead of my sister if the house breaks up, at least if it doesn't break up in a way that has her moving in with some guy who'll object to there being three in the bed as a new and exciting surprise each morning. I guess my sister might conceivably also move into a less chaotic arrangement one day. They all might.
I could find another house like this one, if I needed to. But I get used to people, even if they never get used to me. And at some point I'll have issues with aging out of the "casual pile of roommates" demographic.
I could try living alone, in some sufficiently industrially-managed apartment building that no human being forgetting that I'm in unit 470 ever threatens my continuing to be in it. (I might have to treat my job a little less casually, but I could do that.) But it sounds awful, and not just because the kind of job I can hope to hold down is not the kind that pays well. I don't know how unlonely I could get if people knew who I was, but I'm sure I can get lonelier than I am now, when I can as often as not get somebody I've known for a few years to play video games with me, and probe for updates on the siblings I don't live with while I help my sister with the dishes even though she has no specific memory of having ever listed them for me in the past, and wake up next to my girlfriend who is still usually happy to meet me.
So for now I live here, and I haven't ever come home from the store to a serious household meeting about how everybody having guests over all the time is creating difficulties for everyone else. I think it's working.
The thing is...
Okay, so, sometimes I imagine what it might have been like when I was a fetus. For other people, not for me, I assume I knew at the time what it was like for me and have simply forgotten in an ordinary manner since then. I don't know what it's like for people, when they forget me, and I can't ask because they don't remember doing it. But someone was pregnant with me, probably, at some point, unless I'm a fairy changeling which would admittedly explain some things. They may or may not have gotten responsible prenatal care about it but they didn't terminate me. I don't know if that's because they couldn't remember I was there long enough to make an appointment, or because they assumed they were a surrogate for someone and I was just a stranger's baby they were holding onto for an unusually long time, or because I wasn't skippish the way I am now until after I was born, or what. I don't know if I got abandoned at the hospital first thing, or if the medical records were emphatic enough to diagnose someone with postpartum psychosis when they professed confusion about their offspring so that my original parents brought me home in the hopes that I'd make sense once they had more sleep. Did they forget altogether, about not just the baby but the pregnancy, after they left me on a changing table in a public bathroom on the assumption that I belonged to that other person over there, or never picked me up again after setting me down in the grass at the park?
People notice I exist when I'm around. I'm not invisible. I can interact in an almost totally normal way with store clerks, bus drivers, people who are either new at the warehouse or can be led to expect that I am, and of course internet randos except for the step where I have to pull my computer out of the household lost and found once a week. I can go wherever a random person who hasn't made a nuisance of himself so far might be allowed to go, and a lot of places where you need tickets if it's not too hard to tailgate and the security process relies on sustained suspicion of a specific guy.
But I think I must have been a baby once. I went through all the memorable phases of childhood, why not that one?
And if I was a baby, didn't I have to be born, didn't I have a mother and a father like people generally do?
Don't people resemble their parents?
Because the other day, somebody asked what the ratio of baby formula powder to water was, and I knew it from memory.
No one ever asks me to babysit, because I'm a stranger. I should have no practice with this. But the household collective has aged and cycled, from the college kid range to the point where sometimes someone's babysitting their nephew or volunteering to host a friend's baby shower, sure. All the babies I can remember have names, and expected hours of return to their families, and sometimes fussy schedules of nap and feeding magnetized to the fridge. But they would, wouldn't they?
So I try - maybe I try this over and over, maybe I've come to this conclusion a thousand times. Maybe a thousand times I've looked through the medicine cupboard and found all of the pill bottles with my girlfriend's name on them. Maybe a thousand times I've counted heads, not residents but heads. Maybe a thousand times I've checked my browser history to see if I have had cause to learn more than the formula ratio, in the past. So I try to be the sort of person who'd rather accidentally kidnap a baby and have to make my apologies and melt into mismemory if I were mistaken, rather than leave one behind. If the household were ever to dissolve, and if it turned out that someone - someone else, of course - were babysitting, unannounced, with the most questionable timing, while the junk went in boxes and the furniture went in trucks.
I do most of the grocery shopping.
I keep formula in stock, and if it starts piling up, maybe I'll switch to dinosaur nuggets.