It was a safe place where I lived.
If I had told someone, he would have called me an idiot. But it was what it was: Safe.
It was no easy life living next to Arkham Asylum. When the children in grade two found out that I was living next to it, they started redlining me. And I started drowning. I really drowned in my own tears when I was sitting alone in my room. Mom always comforted me. It has always been like this: Mom and me against the world. Of course it wasn't always that easy, but I tried my best to be a good, a patient daughter. And this is what I had to be. Patient.
Mom worked in Arkham, so we lived next to it. She was feared of revenge of the inmates.
'They want Gotham, not Arkham. They'll leave this place as fast as they can when they escape', she'd said. She was right. There have been lots of escape attempts, but not even a single patient has discovered our little house through the years. Nobody did.
I've become familiar with the noises. Silence. Deep, dark silence. Or halogen headlights, which illuminated the dark and the helicopters, that were flying over the roofs of the night. Over the years I learned to hide my fear, I stopped hiding under my blanket. Instead I sat on the window ledge and watched. It seemed like a show to me, a little production of madness, a fight of men and madmen.
The men always won.
But the story I want to tell goes a different way.
And in the end you won't be able to tear apart men and madmen.