John Monroe stood awkwardly on the ledge of the 10 story parking garage. His dark clothing blended into the shadows making him practically invisible, but he was used to that. He was used to feeling invisible.

One night a week he made his way to the garage. He would park on the bottom level and climb 10 flights of stairs to get to the top so that he could balance on the ledge. He didn’t think about jumping because he wanted to die, he thought about jumping to remind him why he wanted to live. For some it might seem like a morbid approach, but for John it was a necessary reminder. For John it reminded him that he could do anything he wanted, it reminded him that he controlled his destiny.

Any day of the week John looked and acted normal. He was quiet, average height, brown hair and blue eyes. In a crowd he would blend in until he needed to stand out. His walk was confident, resolved in a sense, his shoulders were pulled back and his head upright as his eyes darted from object to object. He observed everything, taking it all in and calculating it.

At age 12 he knew something was different, he saw things that he knew weren’t real, but they were still there.

For a while he pretended he didn’t see them, but the older he got the more real they were. At first they just existed, they were nothing more then shadows moving back and forth, to and fro. But as time went by they transformed into figures with faces, clothes, and expressions.

Up to this point every person he had met had one. It was a shadow like figure that followed them around, clinging to their soul almost as if it was sucking them dry. He noticed that the closer the figure was, the weaker the person was.

He couldn’t see many people from atop of the parking garage, but then again that was why he was up there. He wanted to be alone while he flirted with death, wondering what it would sound like if he dove head first towards the pavement.

“This must be what it feels like to be God,” he sighed as he dangled his right leg in the air. He wasn’t really speaking to anyone in particular, just thinking out loud. He had tried this before, the dive and rush of the wind through his ears as he fell head first towards the concrete. On impact it sounded like a gunshot going off in his head, but there was no pain, only noise and a little bit of blood.

The city skyline illuminated the sky to the south, it was beautiful, but with it came a certain haunting. The terror associated with so many people hurting. So many people needing help, so many people searching for the same answer. John always wondered if there was anyone else out there like him. Anyone that could see what he saw, here what he heard, and do what he did. It didn’t really seem like it, simply because he knew the truth – he was a freak of nature.

He had tried to ask for help before, but it didn’t make sense. The things he saw and heard were so unbelievable that sometimes he questioned his own sanity. It was as if he lived in his own world, alone.

John stepped back from the ledge onto the parking space below. It was time to go home, time to try and regather his thoughts and prepare for another day, another day of blending in. Things had been more quiet recently, the figures had grown less vivid, but they were still there. It took him about five minutes to get back to his car, and another 10 minutes to follow the deserted streets home.

He hadn’t been sleeping much recently, the nightmares were back. It was as if every night a movie played in his head, different people and different places, but the same figures and the same story line. The imagines had become so consistent in his life that he just accepted them as real. Ever so often he would remember a lesson from Sunday school that taught the difference between angels and demons, occasionally he wondered if that was what he was seeing, but it never really made sense so he just ignored it.

In the eyes of everyone around him he was normal, but he knew the truth…