I miss him most on Winter mornings.

I walked. Part of me felt like running as fast as I could until there was no strength left in me, and part of me felt like falling to the ground and just lying there. So I walked. The night was quiet, save for the rustlings of leaves and other mysterious products of the nocturnal lonesomeness. My legs were vigorous in movement but my heart was not. My heart wasn't beating. There was an inexpressible sense of emptiness, among sensations from weariness and dread. I kept imagining Mrs. Kimoro calling the cops as soon as she found that I was not in my room. She would explain the situation to them as a six year old would explain a math problem to a teacher, repelling any sort of severity the police would normally feel. I hated that about her.

I took out my cigarette and lit it. The wind blew the smoke in my direction and I felt the hot, sweltering twinge of it on my chin. I pictured the police watching me light my cigarette from a distance, not wanting to intervene until it was completely evident that I was disobeying the law. They didn't care, not about me, not about my health, and not about Kimoro. The only thing they cared about was their jobs.

The alley was peaceful and the night was still.

When I had left the building, I walked quietly and hesitantly. When I opened the door and stepped out into the world, I was half expecting someone sitting on the doorstep, asking me where the hell I thought I was going at one in the morning. But no one was there. No one cared about the night, and so they left the night alone. I liked this loneliness and so I took a few more steps. I looked back at Mrs. Kimoro's window. The room was dark. She hadn't woken up. There was a sense of disappointment. Then I thought about the world. I thought about my life and how much of it I didn't care for. Finally my lonesome and weary misery kept me walking.

And now I was at the alley, breathing poisonous fumes into my lungs. I don't know why I started this habit in the first place. Yes I do. It was a product of the desire to be wanted. I wanted to be thinner; I wanted to be more beautiful. Somewhere inside me I knew a few pounds of fat wouldn't make a difference in the eyes of the beholder that actually did want me. But I didn't think about it too much.

I went into the park. It was so much more serene than it was in the day. There were no loud kids running around and parents cursing at them and telling them to behave. There was no human life, only the park. For a moment it didn't seem like human beings built it. It was just an isolated and peaceful part of the nocturnal world.

The swings were broken. I pushed one of them and attempted to sit on another but I merely toppled over. In the end I sat on a lonely metal slide that the natural world had turn into a piece of rust. I sat and thought about nothing and everything.

The death stick was gone. I dropped the butt onto the woodchip ground and stepped on it to snuff the fire out. I didn't know what to do with myself.

I don't know how long I sat there, and what exactly went in through my mind. The one thing I do remember is thinking about the book that was in my bag. It was the fourth book of an amazing adventurous series of stories, set in Ancient Egypt. I don't know what about it that appealed to me. Maybe it was the amount of detail and sincerity the author put into the stories, or maybe it was merely my obsession with the strange world of Egypt. It was far away. It wasn't here. And I've been here for too long.

Then I started wondering why people wrote stories. I realized that literature and art and music are the most remarkable triumphs of humankind. It all comes from one's mind and imagination, filtered by life experiences and memories. It doesn't matter what genre the stories are written in. The fictional and fantastic stories about dwarves swinging swords are still products of the heart and imagination. People write stories because stories are distant interpretations of their own lives.

That noteworthy thought produced a disheartening one. So human life, set in the world of reality, can never be as beautiful and significant as the lives generated by fiction? I knew this was the truth.

Ever since I was a child I dreamt of crossing over to those fictional worlds and becoming parts of those stories. I imagined myself helping the characters in the missions they had to accomplish. I saw myself in romantic and loving relationships with the characters I fell in love with. I was still a child, because these dreams were still the only dreams that made me smile.

I couldn't live like this.

Occasionally I heard cars passing by and I wondered if they were police cars. But no, most of them passed to the direction far away from my building. Then I heard a plane flying across the dark, starless sky, and I remembered how every time I heard a plane, I'd always wish I was on it, that I was being taken to another place. It seemed like my only chance of happiness was in escape.

I heard someone running towards me, and for a moment I was glad. I saw Kiba.