Nothing lasts forever...

He would visit me from time to time to talk, always at night, shrouded in shadows, quiet. He would never try to touch me again but instead, he would sit somewhere and chat for hours.

I enjoyed his talk.

His voice was so deep it captivated me completely and I held to his words as if they were buoys in the middle of the Night Sea.

I grew more and more accustomed to his chatting about distant lands, his travels, his life; and without even noticing, during the day I would spend a lot of time looking out the window, longing for his nightly visits. Whenever he was around, my skin would emit the faintest glow, but when I was alone, thinking about him, I was sure the glow was not that evident and it even could just be concealed by the little sunlight from the window.

What if they noticed the change in me? Would they take an interest? Would they move me somewhere else? I tried to quiet my mind.

Then, suddenly, he stopped coming. 

Was it my fault? 

Did he get bored with me?

Was I not interesting anymore? Like the rest of the people who came to see me or study me?

Despair took me in its cold embrace and wouldn't let go. 

After weeks of waiting, I finally refused to look out the window again, and it didn't even interest me to watch the shadow theatre. I would hide my eyes behind my hands, sitting in the corner, clawing at my skin to ease some of the desperation I was sinking into. The physical pain was not that hard to manage.

I don’t know how much time had passed by since I last saw him. Was it just days? Or had years already come and gone? I started to forget his face.

One morning I heard movement too close to my cage and I woke up abruptly. The errand boy was standing there, watching me, observing. I did not move nor opened my eyes. He was talking about something, but I did not listen. After a while, he left and I just tried to fall asleep again. The next morning was the same: that person studying me, me trying to ignore it. There were days and days of the unchanged behaviour of the man that kept coming to talk to me, while my caretakers walked up and down the place tending to neighbour creatures.

Once he brought a broom and they let him in to clean the cage; another day, he cleaned the window. All the time he was there he kept talking about his work, his errands, his life, and I listened with a little curiosity. From time to time he would caress my shoulders, or lightly touch my legs, and he would say with a smirk that I was soft but cold. One time he gave me some iridescent pink strawberries he had bought at the market close to his home. They were my favourite.

One morning, however, my caretakers were away and the place was supposed to be closed. I was counting the specks of dust that floated in from the window when I heard an uncommon noise. I turned and saw the man standing there, smiling.

“You have grown a lot”, he conceded. 

Everything turned dead cold...

"But this is gonna take me down..."