I was not born into exceptional circumstances.
I was just an average baby boy, delivered to two loving parents in the small community of Pallet Town in Kanto.
My father died when I was four years old, the result of getting trapped inside a building in the nearby Viridian City which Team Rocket blew up in pursuit of a group of rare Pokémon.
His grave is on the outskirts of Pallet Town, flanked by a tall grey slab of stone, holding his name, birth date and death date, as well as the words Loving father, husband and friend.
I still visit the gravesite occasionally, on rainy days when I know there won't be many people around.
I miss my father very much to this day.

I miss most people in fact.
With the life that I've led, I end up having to leave a lot of people behind. Not usually (or even ever) by choice but usually it's to protect their privacy, their discretion and, of course, their safety.
As one of Team Rocket's most hated enemies, they will do whatever they can to weaken me or to trigger a reaction out of me or even just to hurt me.
After my mother was held hostage in our own home (I rescued her by working alongside the police), I moved her to a secret location and hardly ever visited it, adamant that they would never hurt her again.
She still suffers from the experience...nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks to that awful day. She hides it from me, maintains that it wasn't a big deal and waves away my questioning of how she's coping with a casual flick of her hand.
My mother is one of life's wonderful people who never wants to hold anyone back with her own issues or emotions.
She has never wanted to stand in my way and hinder my ascent to the top, she cheered me forward every day from our homestead in Pallet Town.
I wish I could spend more time with her, I really do, but it's risky. Team Rocket seems to have covert eyes everywhere, always observing, always scanning and always waiting with baited breath to expose a weak spot.

I've left many friends behind over the years, most of them accumulated on my travels.
I was always somewhat of a loner growing up and I never had many friends at school. I was scrawny as a kid and got bullied for it, as well as for the fact that my family were poor and (as hard as my mother tried), my clothes were always somewhat worn and scruffy.
Blue was always a constant friend to me though, as hard as they might be to believe now. I know how the world sees us and how the media tries to convey us...two people who grew up in the same town, bitter rivals from the start until the end.
But it wasn't always like that. Blue used to be my best friend growing up. Leaf was our other best friend but I'll get to her later.
Anyway, Blue defended me from school bullies, confided in me about his father walking out on them and shared everything he had with me. We even held on to the same dream of growing up to become Pokémon champions, way back when we were just little kids with scraped knees and runny noses, playing with our Pokémon action figures and idolising heroes like Sabrina the psychic Pokémon master, Lieutenant Surge the Lightning American and the world-renowned Elite Four.
How was I to know that I'd grow up to become a hero in their eyes?
And that I'd lose Blue in the process, when a torrent of competitiveness and jealousy took him over?
I miss Blue a lot now. There are lots of times when I'd like to just sit and talk to him, play video games together and laugh with him, like when we were young.
Other friends have come and gone, and I pine for all of their company too.
But I miss Blue the most. He was my best friend.

I can't hold on to anyone for long, nor can I stay in any one place for more than a few months. I tried to settle down in Celadon City once in my twenties and even made a great group of friends there.
But Team Rocket took that from me shortly after my one year anniversary of living in the city. In the dead of night, they tracked down my friends one by one and kidnapped them, demanding Mewtwo as the ransom.
Luckily, I was able to bring Team Rocket crashing to their knees without having to hand Mewtwo over to their clutches.
My friends insisted that I stay with them in Celadon after that but I knew I had to move on. The place was tainted for me and I wouldn't have been able to regain the happiness I'd once kept there.
I have the memories though. They're the only things that don't change when everything else modifies itself horribly in front of you.

After the Celadon incident, I stopped trying to set up house and just wandered.
That's where my nickname, Roaming Red, came from.
I travelled from place to place, thwarting Team Rocket and other criminal organisations, including Team Magma and Team Plasma. I joined forces with Lance the Dragon Master once, to put a stop to a Team Galactic takeover in the Sinnoh Region.
Once we had successfully put down their plans, I admitted to him my fear of creating more enemies for myself and thus becoming even more isolated from the opportunity to have a normal life.
I'll never forget the wise words that accompanied the sad, understanding smile he gave me..."We are lonely people Red. But we are necessary people. It's true that we abandon a lot of hope for ourselves, but that's only so we can create it for those who have none."
Over the years, Lance's words of insight are one of the only things that have kept me going.

The other thing of course is the family I have always kept with me...my loyal and loving Pokémon team.
I have a special bond with the six that were given the title "the all-star team" by the media...Pikachu, Espeon, Blastoise, Venusaur, Charizard and Mewtwo.
Words can't begin to describe how much I value having them around, how much I love them and how grateful I am that wherever I go, they gladly go with me.
But as thankful as I am for their presence, I can't help but miss human interaction.
Having another person by my side would be a dream come true...one of the many friends I had to leave behind, or my mom, or Blue. Even my old mentor Professor Oak or an accomplice like Lance would be an appreciated companion for these lonely roads.
But dwelling on that idea for too long makes me feel sad. It makes me pine for the person I want the most, the person I once had; only to watch her slip through my fingers.
The woman who shared my bed and loved me and cared for me and understood me.
Leaf.

Leaf was Blue and I's other best friend as children. We always played together, we were forever sleeping over at each other's houses and we were completely inseparable. As we grew older however, we began to drift apart. There were no falling outs or fights; only the natural, subtle gliding away that friendships sadly tend to do as we get older.
By the time we were sixteen, Leaf was barely more than a girl we waved to in the hallways at school and occasionally chatted to at the bus stop. I always missed her though and in that time, I also noticed how pretty she had become.
Years later however, shortly after I'd freed Silph Co from the Team Rocket invasion, I ran into Leaf in Fuchsia City where she was attempting to hunt down some Pokémon that had been stolen from kids around the area by Team Plasma.
That was my first introduction to Team Plasma and (as the news reports confirmed) their first strike in Kanto.
I joined forces with Leaf who, by that point, was a strong and capable trainer. The passion for justice that had always lived inside her flourished during our adventure together and I think that was when I began to become infatuated with her.
She had a boyfriend at the time though (a Vulpix was one of the Pokémon stolen from his younger brother) so I kept my distance. But over the next five years, we made sure to stay in touch with one another, whether that meant meeting up for coffee back home in Pallet Town or grabbing a burger at a beachside restaurant in Cinnabar Island.
The rest of the time, we caught up with one another via e-mail, and we managed to rekindle the bond from our childhood years that had been lost long ago.
I liked talking to Leaf. She always made me feel better about things, particularly my ever-growing loneliness. Her father had died when she was young too and her mother had struggled to make ends meet so we had experienced similar childhoods and she understood a lot of what I had to say. Even when she didn't understand she listened and offered me some guidance. She gave good advice and was wise about the ways of the world; particularly people and the way human nature works.
She was a good friend to have and I was grateful for her.
We only properly fell in love at the age of twenty-five, after I had become an official Pokémon master by defeating the Elite Four and my celebrity status as a "hero" was growing.
Scared of the seclusion from normal society I was suffering as well as the death threats coming from seemingly every criminal syndicate under the sun, I sought comfort in a friend's arms.
And oh, did I find comfort.

I think I was the happiest I ever was in my whole life during my relationship with Leaf. We set up home in the sweet little settlement of New Bark Town in the Johto region and were very happy. Leaf worked as a schoolteacher in the local kindergarten and loved her job.
While I had always been given very generous compensations by the government for my work against criminal groups, I spent some time touring around colleges and schools, giving talks on proper Pokémon care and Pokémon training.
I also took on some research missions for Professor Oak and Professor Elm but I'm not supposed to talk about that too much as the information on them is classified. I still "fought evil" as the kids who bought my action figure put it (I still cringe at the thought of that thing existing) but things seemed to have calmed down a bit in my life.
So I spent my days with Leaf, getting to know her entirely and adjust to living with somebody, and I adored every second of it. For the first time in nearly my whole life, I didn't feel alone.
And that was a big deal for me.

In a ceremony in our birthplace of Pallet Town, Leaf and I married at the age of twenty-seven. One celebrity magazine wanted to pay us two million yen for the exclusive pictures but we turned them down. I was never one for the public eye.
We honeymooned in Mossdeep City in Hoenn and just about a year later, Leaf gave birth to twins; our daughter Kris and our son Ethan.
Never before had I loved something as much as I loved my kids. The second they were born, I felt a sense of completeness that hadn't been there since my father's death. They helped to heal an old wound, those two beautiful babies.
That was when the havoc started.