He has no name, and he has no one. No one calls for him, because how could they if he has no name?
Do you exist, if no one knows you?
No one wants him. His own mother did not want him, did not want him enough to take him along to wherever she went. He has glimpses of her, a fleeting handful of memories that could be swept away with even the slightest wind. He has nothing of a father. Did he not have one? Surely, he must have?
How can your own mother not want you? The thought haunts him.
The pictures and the words, the pages upon pages of books and newspapers that he has made his family tell him that there are indeed others. Far away, somewhere where it is cold and the snow does not melt. They call them the snowmen.
He remembers her smell. In his dreams, he hears her singing a song that he does not know the words to, only the sounds. A language, maybe? Of another time, another place.
A place they all went and left him behind.
Her eyes are most of what he has of her, and they are his. The perfect double of the amber brown he has come to know in discarded mirrors, puddles, creeks.
She leaves him when he is small and cannot walk well and then he is alone.
Alone. He grows taller and taller, alone. The forest shrinks and there is no one to tell him what he should do. There are dogs and wells and horses, scary things that bite and small humans that chase him with sticks
Did she forget him? They did not want to forget him, right? Surely, they did not. It must have been a mistake.
What was his kind like?
His. His kind. Belonging to him, who has no one.
Or does he?
It's tantalizing to think of. It's enchanting, to allow himself to hope that somewhere in this gigantic world, beyond the forest and across the sea, on the other end of the earth, there is someone somewhere waiting for him.
Missing him. Longing for him.
Does she dream of the moment their eyes meet and he is in her arms once again as well? Surely, she must. She has to, he needs her to.
He is lonely, desperately so, and surely he must not be the only one of his kind left. He longs for discovery like so many and yet it is discovery of himself that he craves. For someone to tell him that he is wrong. That his family is alive.
There are people who do this. People who look for him, who follow his tracks and hunt his kind, who are searching as desperately as he is. Who grab at scraps of dreams and chase ideas to the ends of the earth. If they can search for him, he will search for them. These humans with strange voices and stranger eyes who are put in headlines and pressed onto pages who have crossed oceans and climbed mountains in pursuit of him.
The thought of it makes him shiver. That somewhere out there, someone is dreaming of finding him and taking him away from this place, taking him to where he belongs. It is an intoxicating thought
Instead, he is like the princesses in the dusty fairytale books he reads. Lost, longing, waiting to be rescued.
He must find his own rescue. The key to it all is an address in a newspaper. A way out in the form of a street number.
Surely, this is not all there is for him?
Hope, it turns out, does come from knights. Just not necessarily the kind in shining armor.