It's strange, but Jessie's the only one who really understands.  Or maybe it's not so strange.  I don't know.

As a child, I always used to sneak off into my mother's wardrobe, and hide amongst the soft twirls of fabric while the rest of the household searched high and low for me.  It was my favourite hiding place back then, and it held all the wonders I could ever dream of.

It's never really made much sense to me that a man's clothing mustn't be as fine to touch, to wear as that of a woman.  Why should it be so?  Why must a man's legs always be confined in trouser legs, while women can dance around in skirts and dresses if they so choose?

Jessie understands how I feel.  It's a little strange, because for her it was always the other way around, I guess because she's a woman.  Everything about men's clothing that I hated - that's what she loves.  The restriction, the confinement, the limitations, the expectations...

The expectations.

That is what I can't handle.  I've never been able to live up to the expectations of my family and their friends.  They weren't my friends.  They didn't care about me at all.  At least my family were interested in my becoming a gentleman.  Of course, I'd much rather they were interested in me, but...

Jessiebell was simply the last straw.  She wasn't too bad at first - she had an extraordinary wardrobe which could have kept me entertained for years, but then - my parents got a hold of her.  I wouldn't have minded getting married to the sweet little girl who let me borrow her dresses to play in.  The whip-wielding S&M reject was something else entirely.  She still is, come to think of it.  Only I'd rather not.

I've often wondered how my parents managed to ruin things like that.  Did it really mean so much to them that I turn out to be a proper young man?  What's wrong with liking dresses anyway?  Mother wears them all the time - only she's a woman...

It's not like wearing a dress would make me change gender all of a sudden.  I'm most definitely a man - I like being a man! - and no amount of lace or frills or velvet can alter that fact.  Inflatable body suits may make it look like a close call, but I know how I feel inside.

They don't, though.  Nobody does, except for Jessie.

She's never had as much trouble with it as I have - it's common enough to see women in trousers these days that few people notice the detail which she covers whenever she dons more masculine attire.  She wears those costumes as comfortably as I wear my more feminine clothing, yet I'm the one they always point out to their friends, laughing behind their hands or even outright in my face.

It irritates me that they're so caught up in their little insecurities regarding their gender-consciousness.  Whatever happened to equality of the sexes?  Just another of the 'evils of goodness and love' - an ideal that fails in practice by a prejudiced society...

The other Rockets would often laugh whenever we said our motto, because we'd changed it from the original, just a little.  We wanted it to reflect our thoughts and actions a bit more than the regular one did.  We know what it means every time we say those lines - they're what we really feel about the world and our purpose here.  The lack of true gender equality is simply one of the things neither of us like about society, and it's one of the ones more frequently on my mind during our speech.

I wonder if my parents realise how often I think of them?  I wonder if they really care?

Somehow I doubt they do - and that hurts, it truly does.

At least I have Jessie, now.  Unlike my parents, she doesn't expect me to be anything other than who I am.  She has a bit of a temper - but nothing that really worries me, not after Jessiebell - and she doesn't mind me dressing up occasionally.

Jessie makes a great shopping partner, too.

I don't know what I would do without her.  I'd probably be chained up in the dungeon-basement back home, screaming my head off.  That isn't a particularly pleasant thought.  Or I might really have died in the snow that day, before Jessie dragged me back to her hideout...

And all because I happen to like skirts.

Or maybe they just don't like me?

I don't know.  It shouldn't matter.  I have real friends, now, who like me for who I am, and not for what they want me to be.  It shouldn't matter what other people think, even my parents.

It shouldn't matter.

Yet, they're my parents.

And so it does.