This is a throwaway account. I don't wish to have myself attached to this story in any form. My main account is followed by some friends and acquaintances that I would prefer to not be questioned by. After I post my story, I will not be replying to comments or dms so I'm sorry if I'm not able to clear up any questions or concerns you might have, so I'll do my best to help you understand.

I've lived in Australia my whole life. I have no siblings. My mother and father have always loved me, but found it very difficult to spend time with me due to certain obligations and, to be frank, debts racked up by my father. Gambling addiction is a pretty big problem over here. They weren't able to receive too much government support for quite a few reasons, and so spent most of my early life working. I didn't mind much, it was pretty easy for me to make friends and I've always been a sociable person.

When I was in year 2 (roughly 7-8 years old), I spoke to a girl in my class who I hadn't really interacted with before. We'll call her Alice. I don't remember how she approached me or how we became friends so quickly after that. Most of my friends were boys before that time, but as they got older they had started to see me less like a friend and more like one of the girls in their class that they had to take it easy on when we played oz tag at recess and lunch.

I begged our teacher to let me sit in the empty chair next to hers during class. She agreed with almost no convincing, wondering why I would ever want to "sit in the corner that no one else was interested in". It was one of the closest seats to the board so it wasn't totally unrealistic to say that no one else seemed to care about it. It also kind of rocked forwards if I were to try to erase my work to violently.

Although I was young, I found it extremely odd that Alice didn't have man other friends. I tried to involve her with my other friends when we played games at recess and lunch but they never even tried to talk to her. She looked more lonely surrounded by people than when it was just the two of us. I drifted away from them. In class, I did my best not to let her distract me with her jokes or long stories she used to make up. I began getting into more and more trouble for giggling throughout the lessons. When parent/teacher interviews came up, my teacher had told my parents that I was a very creative young girl with a lot of potential, if only I would stop giggling while she was teaching. My parents, although originally concerned, again, didn't have the time to sort things out with me. Around that time, my dad had fallen off the wagon again. I got a quick lecture but that was about it.

After a few months, long after my teacher had given up on trying to get me to pay attention and to stop whispering to Alice beside me, the stories Alice began to come with became more and more... real. She mentioned things happening to her characters that seemed to be very relative to my life, things that I hadn't told her yet. It started off normal, like one of the characters eating cereal for dinner because there wasn't anything left in the house. It turned into someone's daddy having to sleep in the broken down car in the yard instead of his bed after a fight with mummy. It was at the point after she had made up another story about a man secretly going into his wife's wallet that I felt my chest tighten with embarrassment and fear. I wasn't supposed to talk about what happened at home with other people, and yet she was relaying recent events in front of me as if from my own memory. I hadn't told her any of it. I got angry and demanded an explanation on how she knew so much. I was contemplating not being her friend anymore, but I had distanced myself so much from all my other friends to be with her that I was too proud to go back. They gave us weird looks as well, as if there was something wrong with us.

Alice looked at me strange too, in that moment. She made a face as if I had told her everything and that I was forgetting. I shook my head, waiting for something to make sense. I yelled at her to answer, worry building in my gut as I was about to start crying in panic. She told me that her mum was my mum's sister, making her my cousin. It made some sense to me back then. My mum was from Lebanese descent and Alice was a bit fairer than me, but still had the token dark hair that rest of us seemed to have. I was a kid and hadn't given it much thought, but I was so glad to hear that there was some other explanation that wasn't my fault that I didn't question it either. We both began crying at our fight. It was intense for us as children, and we were best friends, after all. I didn't like that I had yelled at her and blamed her for something. I wanted to apologies, but I decided to wait for the next day so that we could both cool down. Though still wary of her and uncomfortable from our conversation, I tried not to let it bother me. We didn't talk in class for the rest of the day.

The next day she didn't come in to school, or the next day after. I waited for her outside the school gate on the third day, but she didn't show up then either. I wondered if it was my fault, that maybe she was upset with me for getting mad at her and she had decided to leave. No one else liked her there, so what was the point of staying. I spent my lunch times alone waiting for her to come back, not wanting to play with anyone else, and nobody attempting to play with me either. I wanted to ask my teacher where she had went and when she was coming back, but I had grown to hate her for always yelling at me in class and for keeping me back during break times for talking too much.

I needed to find her outside of school. I never went to her house and she had never been to mine before either. She said her parents wouldn't let go to anyone's house. My parents were never available to take me there anyways. This was a time long before any kind of social media, or when it became normal to give your children phones before the age of 16, so that wasn't a contact option either. After coming home from school one afternoon, I was surprised to hear my mum in the kitchen. She gave me a kiss and a cuddle after seeing me.

I asked her about her sister, Alice's mum, and wondered if she had moved houses. I distinctly remember my mum dipping her teabag into the hot water in her mug repeatedly as she looked down at me with a frown. She didn't say anything in response. I asked if maybe she had gotten sick and couldn't take Alice to school.

"Habibti, you only have uncles. I don't have any sisters, and none of them have any children named Alice."

From that point onward, I can't recall what my thoughts were, only that I felt like I had been lied to and I was sure who it was from. Either my mum was lying to me about her sister, which didn't make any sense, or Alice had lied and she wasn't my cousin at all, meaning that the things she knew about me came from somewhere else. I asked my mum again about my auntie and my cousin, thinking that maybe my mum had somehow forgotten about them. My mum stopped dunking her tea bag. She told me again that she had no idea what I was talking about. I started to panic, wondering if other people at school knew about my mother and father and all the family problems we had. Maybe Alice had found out about it through gossip. If my parents found out, they would think it was me who told everyone. At that point I was begging my mum to tell me truth, refusing to believe it to be true. She lost her patience with me and yelled at me for accusing her of lying, screaming that she didn't know where I got all those crazy ideas from. I went to the living room and began trying to convince myself that everything would be okay.

I went to school the next week determined to get answers. I asked my teacher about where Alice could be.

"Alice? Which class is she from?"

I stared at her blankly. I explained exactly who Alice was, only to have a similar interaction to the one I had with my mother earlier. She had no idea what I was talking about.

Its been over thirty years since then. For the rest of primary school, I obsessed over trying to find even an inkling of Alice's existence. She had never come to school again, and there was nothing to ever prove that she had been there in the first place. I wasn't authorized to access school records, but I couldn't find her face or name in any of our yearbooks or school photos either, despite my memories of her standing right beside me on picture day. I chalked it up to an overactive imagination, as did many others, even though my heart knew that she had existed and that my best friend was not just something I created.

To make a long story short, my father left around when I began high school. It was an act of love, believe it or not. He couldn't stop getting us into debt, and we were better off without him and his addiction. As for my mother, she past away last year from breast cancer. It was difficult losing her.

A friend of mine and I were experimenting with one of those ancestry DNA kits that tell you about your ethnicity. Nothing all that interesting came up about me other than what I already knew of my parents' backgrounds. However, not long after getting my results, I was contact by a facility located only about two hours from where I lived, claiming to have a resident that I was related to, and that I was the only relative of hers that I could track down. Having been pretty much the only member of my extended family that was actually born in Australia, I could understand how it would have been difficult trying to locate anyone else. My curiosity peaked when I looked up the place and found out it was basically a psychiatric facility.

Now that I was totally on my own, I felt a strong need to fill a hole inside myself with family. I wasn't married, and although my uncles were still around, I couldn't shake the look of the slight disappointment and disdain they sometimes threw at me because of my father. I realized that whoever was in that facility was waiting for me to find them, and that they were just as lonely as I was. I owed it to both of us to be by her side, even if she was in the loony-bin.

I made the two hour drive to the facility. It was very remote, with security measures in place that I could only really compare to a prison. I didn't feel very welcome there by the staff, and the patients seemed a little bit too excited to see a new face within their walls. I was walked over to a room by a nurse after many checks to see that I was who I said I was. I had luckily come prepared. There was no name on the door we stood in front of, so I peaked over at the paperwork the nurse was holding and read the name of the woman I was meant to meet. We'll call her Katie. My eyes fixated on her last name. It was my mother's maiden name.

"Um, so how is she related to me again?"

"According to the chart, she is likely your maternal aunt," the nurse said with no compassion. I shook my head immediately, recalling that long conversation I had with my mother when I was still a child.

"My mum didn't have any sisters."

"Apparently she did. Her folder says that she was admitted for schizophrenia."

"How long has she been here?"

"Her whole life, really. It says here she's the oldest of all her siblings and that she was admitted at 15 years old after a miscarriage not long after arriving in Australia with her family," the nurse said, pointing to her age on the paperwork.

After looking at her age, I could see that my mother would have only been about 1 or 2 years old when Katie was sent away to this place. She never knew she had a sister.

I wasted no more time in stalling and walked in to the room quickly, not wanting to wait another second before I met this woman. I don't know what I expected to see, but it was not an elderly woman tethered to a hospital bed from tubes and wires connected to beeping machines. I took a seat beside the sleeping patient as the nurse left the room without another word. Katie's face looked so much like my mother's it took all the strength I had left not to burst into tears then and there from shock and a sudden sense of missing my mum. I wasn't prepared. I looked at my aunt, her mouth covered with a breathing machine I didn't know the name of and reminded myself that she had been like this since she was only 15 years old. My heart sank.

Her eyes began to flutter open and I didn't move, unsure if it would cause the old woman to panic seeing such an unfamiliar face. My blood turned to ice as the woman slowly gave a warm toothless grin.

"My Alice."

The memories of my childhood came flooding back. I hadn't forgotten about Alice, it would be impossible to. I hadn't heard the name in so long, it was almost overwhelming to hear it again.

"I'm not Alice," I said instinctively.

"No. I guess you're not," she said wearily, her warm smile disappearing and turning to an expression of sincere disappointment. Her accent was heavy, and the breathing mask over her mouth made it difficult to comprehend what she was saying. A moment of silence passed between the two of us. It was filled with sadness. I had seen my mother in her, and she had seen Alice in me. I knew that I couldn't have imagined her. I wasn't sure if I was going to regret it, but I needed to know more.

"Who is Alice?"

"My beautiful daughter. Abnati. They took her away. I thought I would see her again," the old woman said to me in between labored breaths. I sighed sadly. The schizophrenia, I thought. The nurse had said Katie had a miscarriage. She never had her baby, but she thought she did. The poor woman. The names were just a coincidence.

"Do you still see her?"

"Yes. She comes to visit." It felt wrong to try and convince her that she was wrong, and that her daughter was dead long before she ever could have been born. I didn't want to take that away the same way doctors, nurses and medication would have tried to do to her since she was only a teenager. She was nearing the end of her life, and if her delusions kept her happy, then I would play along until her last breath. I felt a strange sense of responsibility towards the woman, as if I had somehow done something to put her in the situation she was in.

"Do you know when she'll be back?"

"Not while you're still here." I paused at the woman's response, unsure of how I should take it. Maybe it was too hard to embrace the hallucinations of her daughter while I was still in the room. Katie spoke again before I could reply.

"She still hasn't forgiven you."

My stomach sunk, recalling my last conversation with my Alice. The argument we had, she hadn't spoken to me for the rest of the day. I never saw her again. I heard one last sentence before the lights turned off and I ran from the room. It was a voice I recognized from memories from my early school days, one I had thought I would never hear again. In that moment, and still to this day, I hope I never hear it again.

"You should be nicer to your friends."