Where is my mind?

"Way out in the water..."

There, on top of the tree, the air felt lighter, purer, so unlike my mind in that very moment.

Why did he love me?

If he still loved me... why?

Why did he have to cheat on me?

Did he ever love me?

Did he regret meeting me...?

Truth is my memories are not the sharpest.

Off and on I get these flashes, images, and I sporadically remember something, although most of the time the images are blurred.

I no longer know if I was born or created.

All I know is the days inside the cage were long and quiet. Not much happened inside or out of it, so I just focused on living, if you could call ‘living’ to just being there. I used to read a lot, since it helped me forget about everything else, to be one of the characters and not a locked up creature.

Those who took care of me paid some attention and scribbled some notes from time to time; occasionally they'd let other people observe me, but very few of them returned a third or fourth time, I guess I wasn’t as interesting as they had hoped.

The window was always open. I could hear life happening on the other side of it but I never dared to look out of fear. I feared what I couldn’t do, the landscapes I couldn’t breathe, the people I couldn’t hold, the sun and the stars. Even when I wanted to escape something inside me made me stay still in the same corner where I always existed.

I don’t quite know what possessed me to look through the window that chilly night. It was a night like any other: my caretakers were gone, the lights went out, everything laid perfectly still inside. But outside there were people walking by the window, chatting, creating all sorts of ghastly shadows interacting inside the little orange square in the wall opposite to the window. I liked to watch that shadow theatre because darkness was within my grasp, unlike the life that cast it. I played to guess what kind of creature walked by and what were they doing and thinking. Surely that elf was getting a ring for a lover, that bunny was trying not to get eaten...

Suddenly all the shadows were swallowed into an indescribable mass that was all of them and was nothing at the same time. Shadows usually don’t do that. It kind of burned without burning, moved just like a fire would do, before turning into what one could identify as a human silhouette.

I wanted to look.

What if it killed me?

It doesn’t matter. I wanna see.

I stood up and peeked. Darkness looked back.

“Hey”

“Hey…”