A/N: Whenever a chapter is completely in italics, it is from Daniel's POV.

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XO,
Leanne

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August 18, 2012

My name is Daniel Callahan. I am only fifteen years old, but I have lived in this house for over fifty years. The house is small and made of brick. There are three small bedrooms and a basement. While she was still able, my mother maintained a flower garden in the front. Tulips were her favorite, especially purple ones.

My grandfather masterfully added a wooden porch that wraps around the back half of the house. My old bedroom window looks out onto the porch, and further onward onto a small field of wildflowers, and further yet onto a pond surrounded by various trees.

    When I was a little child, I would take dips in the pond's cool water on summer evenings. My sweet mother sat on a lawn chair, drinking iced tea, fanning the sun away with her hands while she watched me.

The bugs, birds, and frogs were all my friends. I imagined life as one of them sometimes, especially a frog. I swam and swam making my frog legs stronger and stronger. I loved that pond. I had no idea how on one fateful day I would want nothing more than to get out of it.

I'm sure you have an idea of what I am. You would say that I am a vampire, a ghost, or a lost soul trapped for all of eternity. I am something unnatural and when thought of too much, or suspected, people begin to look around a little more, turn on the lights, and look into the mirror with a quickening heartbeat, afraid something or someone is behind them, peering with knowing eyes.

Someone like me instills fear and distrust. When I was alive, I was a good person, a good boy. It is not my intention now to scare or spook or haunt. I have come to understand that is not the purpose of my afterlife. Yes, I am a ghost, but I am a person, too.

Though I am still fifteen, I consider myself a man now. I have seen and heard so much by living in the same place for so long that I am no longer a child. I know too much. Or have I been dying in the same place for so long?

Living. Dying. Being. I feel I do all three; I confuse them and they get muddled into one thing, and other times I do not feel at all. Nothingness. Loneliness. Emptiness. I have not been given the comfort and peace of death, only the endless expanse of a stolen life.

I no longer harbor resentment, but I will never forget what happened to me and how and why and who did this to me. It was my story, the end to my first life. Today, after seeing her for the first time, whatever kind of life, or death, I had has begun again.

Eternity doesn't feel like forever anymore. It feels like home. The beginning of my new life starts today.