It was pushing through fog. Through thick, floating ocean, that held down his lungs and made moving too hard and thinking was too much effort and running was pointless. It was walking through a dark tunnel with no visible light at the end; at least not any time soon. And it was stumbling down steps; hopping, slipping, tripping, skidding uncontrollably down into…

Arms. Well, a hand, actually. And olive eyes, with spider-leg lashes. And a beaten up gold pocket watch that makes the lightest tick; I have to stop breathing to hear it. It’s almost like I found a grandfather at the bottom of the stairs. A grandfather, with the antics of a toddler, and the body of a boy. A body that, to the untrained, seemed unmarred and flawless. But looking at him, as someone who is one in the same, I could see the resolution in his eyes. The “I belong here, and there’s nothing you can do to me to change that. Nothing they didn’t do first”. It was a broken call for help, barley heard over the walls of self preservation. A call I’d made thousands of times before, always the same results. They say that the first sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. What they don’t understand is sometimes it was that very practice that kept me sane. The small flicker of hope that one day someone would just put an end to the pain, one way or another.

I don’t know where he had come from. I would always tell people that I found him, and he would agree. But truly I know that was never the case. You see, I may have spoken out, but he was the one who stopped and helped. He saw me as someone worth helping. You could call him a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe he was a horn through the fog; a hint of what was to come. But one thing was for sure:

He was the different result.