When he woke up, he was alone. He was surrounded by many people, so many people, but he didn�t know any of them, and they were all miserable, too, so therefore he was alone. He didn�t know exactly where he was, nor exactly what he�d been doing for the past few months�years?

He recalled only glimpses: snippets of voices and screams, blurs of strange faces and different shades of blood, phantoms of dull pains and splitting headaches. Were any of them real? When his eyes had cleared, he�d examined his arms. They were long and white and thin, as if there were no skin, muscle, or tendon to cover the bones. But there was skin, and the skin was mottled with strange white and red marks that shouldn�t have been there. Scars. The scars showed his visions to be truth, but that was the only testimony to prove that they hadn�t been demons concocted in his sickly mind.

For the past year or so, he�d been dreaming.

No! Those weren�t dreams�nightmares!

At eighteen years old, he�d lost his mind. He�d been tortured for years by depression and such woes as self-appointed worthlessness and self-destructive tendencies. A hurricane of emotional distress had finally severed the frail string that kept his soul intact. The months before he lost his mind and collapsed into this nightmare-like non-existence, he had resorted to a life of unfathomable misery. He felt alone, lost, guilty of the sins of the world, a burden to others, forever caught between bawling and screaming, hopeless, hopeless. He�d taken to destroying himself one inch at a time, cutting himself, though it was more like hacking and chopping than the delicate slitting others said they did. Each gash ached and burned, and his arms got so thick with scabs and wounds that eventually it hurt to move. He didn�t want to do it, but it felt too natural. His life was always supposed to hurt; that had been predetermined at his conception. Surely he didn�t deserve the kindness and compassion he was shown, surely he didn�t deserve to waste so much space on this earth. He wanted to stop feeling everything. He wanted to stop bothering people. He wanted to die.

He had thought about it for months�probably for all his life. In the end, he took the knife he cut with and hacked at an area he�d never dared to cut before. He emptied the bathroom cabinet of pills and then sliced up his wrists in every direction. The last thing he remembered, an image that came to him often in his nightmares, was the white glare of the tiled bathroom ceiling as his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he collapsed to the cold floor.

He�d survived, though. Somehow.

He looked at his arms often, touched the scars often�it had really happened, he�d really been there that bloody night�and he wondered how and why he�d lived.

If he was alive at all.

Maybe this was death. Maybe this was Hell.

After all, they tortured him here. Those faceless older people in their bland uniforms beat and abused him. They held him down and poked him and prodded him. They tied his arms together and shoved things down his throat, and as much as he cried and screamed, they never left him alone. He twisted sheets around his neck to escape from them, but they stopped him�he wasn�t allowed to leave this horrible place�he was their hostage, their prisoner, their toy to torture.

There was only one demon he liked. One had blue eyes. Blue eyes, hued like the sky. Blue eyes were everything good in the world. Their color calmed him.

It had taken him a long time to remember why he liked the demon�s eyes so much. Where had he seen them before? Why did they bring back such soothing feelings? For days, he laid on his back on the stiff cot they tied him to, and he scavenged through his trash heap of a mind. He remembered seeing blue eyes, and he remembered�. He remembered being held and touched, but not the way the demons touched him now, no�he remembered being loved. He remembered existing before this hell. He remembered being happy.

He remembered his best friend.

He was calmer when he thought about the blue-eyed boy, and he was happier. When the demons came around to prod him and shove things in his mouth, it was less frightening if he thought about the blue-eyed boy, if he pretended the boy was with him to squeeze his hand. The demons liked it when he cooperated, when he was peaceful and calm. They were nicer to him then, and he felt better afterwards. So he kept doing it.

In time, the fuzzy dreamworld became sharper, and he began to distinguish between the days. He could remember who he had seen the day before and what they had said. The demons started to look less like clawed monsters and more like people. The hallucinations of being torn apart and set on fire dissipated. When he awoke every morning, he knew he was in the same white-walled, chemical-scented room that he�d woken to the day before. His head still hurt, and his memory was blurry, but the nightmares didn�t come as often, and his senses were now aware of his surroundings.

He remembered that his name was Roger.

continue...