He was always like that, always coming across as if he knew everything, even as he pried his fingers into my guts.  The truth of the matter was, I had no idea what this man knew about me.  It was perfectly likely he knew nothing at all.  Yet his omniscient bearing alone was enough to enthrall me, cast adrift as I was on a bottomless sea, riding the waves, clinging to the splinters of a broken ship.  I realized that, at some point in my past, I had surrendered a part of myself to his caretaking.  It was as if he gave clarity to my vaguely defined boundaries, my sense of self.  For me, an awkward, clumsy youth with only rudimentary communication skills, this surrender had been the easiest choice to make.  And he, my unsociable, argumentative friend, had taken-still took-a kind of perverse responsibility for dragging me, kicking and screaming at times, back into the world.