(Hmm… Fondest might be a trip I took with one of my friends to Florida during spring break in middle school. Prior to that, I had just moved to that city a year prior, and hadn’t made any friends until the next year of school, after assigned bus seating put me with someone who recognised Naruto (the first anime I got into that I knew as ‘anime’), and we hit it off. The ‘friends’ I’d had before we moved weren’t all that great, for certain reasons, so that was already great that I found someone I connected with more.

Anyway, she was going on a road trip to Florida (they owned a trailer that they were taking), and she invited me and another of her friends to come. The trip itself was nice, we visited a couple of beaches and swam in the ocean (my first and thus fr only time for both), and got some souvenirs at shops, pretty quiet and mostly just a new experience. I know I still have the air brush t-shirt I bought then and shells. Funniest thing about that trip now that makes it stand out, aside from being the only time I’ve ever gone on a trip with someone where my family wasn’t there, is she and her friend had me come up with a Naruto OC for verbal roleplaying. She’d told me about hers before, but that was the time I was encouraged to make one too. ‘Course, I had not idea about roleplaying at the time, I just went along with it, but it clearly grew. And that OC did come to mind more than a few times, I even started writing fanfiction for a class assignment where we were just supposed to write anything in a journal, though I had no idea what fanfiction really was until much, much later.

…She made me like a lot of things I still do, actually. Showed me parody videos for anime and video games, amvs she’d worked on and ones others had done, got me into Playstation games like Kingdom Hearts and Okami, got me more into anime than just what used to be on Toonami. She did a lot without knowing, so, yeah, time with her like that has to go to ‘fondest’.)