Everything here is a true story, especially about the monsters. There are so many monsters I can hardly keep track anymore, but I’m not so sure I was ever supposed to know they were there to begin with.

            It’s been five years since I met the first monster, the Shadow Man, and he hasn’t left me since. Sometimes I forget about him, but he’s always there, just at the corner of my vision, hiding in the distorted blur of my tears, surrounding me when I dream. I don’t remember what it was like before he came, and I don’t think I want to.

            But I’m being idealistic again. Really, it’s all a trick- a story.

            Five years ago I didn’t have occasion to contemplate the realities of life and love and all those other lofty concepts which tend to send the more intelligent members of our species into spiraling depression, and worse yet cause them to attempt to share their understandings, their misery, with the rest of us. I knew relatively nothing, and was content in my limited understanding. Now I am horribly unsatisfied, not because I understand more but because I realize that I don’t.

            The monsters hate me and they hate each other. They haven’t killed me yet, but I think it’s because they feel something like pleasure when they torture me. No one else knows to gaze at the ceiling until the Victimonster comes into focus, hiding in the corner, waiting to spring and devour the aura, rattling breath on the back of the neck and the sound of his beating heart, still pretending it pumps blood, filling the head; no one else lies quietly awake at night, for fear that Shax or the Triclopes will come again to gorge themselves on the most secret and precious dreams with their silky black tongues and pristine, needle-sharp teeth, leaving instead their excrement of nightmares, or worse yet the seeds of even more terrible monsters than those I already know. No one else misses the Shadow Man, even when he’s there with them, whispering the most terrible things with the sweetest voice, hugging, hurting.