Your footsteps give you away.

When I was young I used to spend my summers at my grandmothers' cottage. It was a very whimsy-looking cottage out in the middle Nowhere Marsh, and it was frighteningly lonely all the time. Which was all fine with my grandmother, of course, she was a very reclusive woman and used to wander aimlessly around the house, melancholically muttering under her breath. I daresay most of the summer days she scarcely acknowledged I was even there, or cared, to be truthful. Though that was alright, my life seemed to be built upon neglect, I'm used to neglect.

It's loneliness that kills me. I'm used to neglect, have grown to expect it, but loneliness is deadly. I mean, with neglect, at least you know someone is always around, you'll quickly learn that they find your company redundant, but you can always revel in the fact that they're there. It is loneliness that kills me, and if it wasn't for Jack, I'd have been severely lonesome during the summers.

Of course, my grandmother used to attempt to vex me by saying how Jack wasn';t real, how he was a fabrication of my rotten imagination, and all that. Jack had warned me she would say such things, and besides, if anything, Jack was even more real than my grandmother.

So I could go on about how much fun me Jack and I used to have exploring the marshes, how we used to collect all kind of weird bugs and confine them within glass jars, how under the harsh heat they used to go mad and turn on each other in a chaotic frenzy . How Jack used to teach me about foetuses and abortions, about plants and their dark uses, how he used to cut up animals and show me their various organs and how they work, how then we used to offer the expended corpses to the fairies positioned deep within the marshes, and how they offered us gifts as thanks.

I could talk about Jack, too. Ole' Jack, who I used to call my very best friend, represented everything that ever meant anything to me anything ever worth living and waking up for. I quite happily remember all of ole' Jack's habits and traits too, how he used to have difficulties converting his thoughts to words, but during nighttimes when we used to gaze up at the stars he used to go into full blown philosophical mode, his soft mouth unreservedly discharging wisdom.
I remember one fine night when the sky was sprinkled with stars and the moon pulsated magnificently on the fine grass we lay upon. All I could remember thinking how divine Jack looked under the luminous of the moon. His back was turned to me, and I remember looking at him admiringly for hours, absolutely certain he was asleep. That's when I thought I was going blind, as if someone had flicked a switch in my mind and I lost all sense of sight. I was on the verge of utter, absolute, chaotic madness, on the verge of screaming out and tearing out my own guts, when suddenly there was a dim radiance. It was Jack, who seemed to be blazing magnificently from within, who seemed to be my only source of light in this dark universe. Jack's eyes met mine, and he gave me a slow, sad smile; a smile that reassured me he had struck a deal with the infinite. That he was destined for great, fantastical things and in order to persue these endeavours he had to first leave me. It was on the tip of my tongue to plead with him when he disintegrated into the thin air.

Ever since Jack's absence it feels as if a dark fog veils my entire life as a result the very act of existing has become massively Herculean. At times I feel completely paralyzed by the emptiness of my life sometimes I embrace my old memories of Jack to comfort me and help me get through the day, but even those are swiftly slipping out of my rapidly decaying mind. One thing I don't think I'll ever forget was something Jack once told me, during one of his philosophical moods.

'Time doesn't change us; we change ourselves over the course of time.'

Only now do I realise how empty his words were.