The shadows were my friends, that is until they grew sick of me.

As a young boy in an orphanage I never had many friends. Most days I would sit in the basement where the older children couldn’t find me and ramble on to myself about this and that, until one day someone began to talk back.

At first I thought I had finally gone mental and that my next foster home would be the asylum, but they kept coming back.

While I sat in the cold basement, void of any light save for the tiny rectangular window at the very top of the room, they were there, and when I walked to school alone, they walked with me.

For so long they would talk to me, and I would simply run away or just ignore them, thinking it was just voices in my head, but at some point, I found myself talking back to them.

I mean they were always there, and they didn’t despise me as everyone else did, so what was the harm in telling them about my day?

Now I know what you’re thinking, this guy is crazy, and maybe I am, but I’m a crazy guy with friends.

After some time I became well acquainted with my shadows, and eventually I even named them. Granted I was eleven when that happened so my names weren’t very original, but Terry, Gary, and Jerry didn’t seem to mind much.

They stayed with me throughout high school and most of college, until one day I asked them to stay behind in my dorm while I went on a date with my new boyfriend.

They had helped me prepare, advising me on which side to part my jet black hair on (after much argument we decided on the left), helping me choose my cologne, and telling me that I should wear my v-neck red shirt rather than my regular tee shirt red shirt.

They didn’t like my boyfriend, Marcus, much but they still helped me get ready for all our dates because that’s what friends are for. But the second I asked them to stay behind and not pester me like they had in every single date i’ve gone on, they lose their sh*t.

“Do you not care for us like we’ve cared for you,” Jerry hissed, spinning around me in a slow circle.

“He must not,” Terry muses from the other side of the room, “You know boys I thought he might be able to stay here for a few more years, but I guess we’ll just have to take him all down to the shadow world.”

They spoke of the shadow world often. Supposedly it was where other shadows lived all together when they weren’t out with humans such as myself. In their world humans were their own slaves, but when they told me about that part they swore they wouldn’t do that to me, so I never worried about it.

“Oh come on Terry how could I go without becoming a slave,” I chuckle thinking they’re just messing around.

“Well then I suppose we’ll just have to make you one won’t we,” Gary says moving closer to me.

And in that moment I realized what they had been doing all along. They had been playing with me. They made me trust them and love them and now they were going to cart me off to their own world. I never mattered to them, they just wanted their own personal slave.

There was no way I’d be able to escape them, I tried too many times when I was younger. 

And if I can’t escape, then I’ll  just have to give them hell.

You can’t run from a shadow, but you can sure as hell invite them to dance.