He was always there.

He sat their with a smudge of paint under his eye. Holding a smoking stick in his hand with this somewhat gruntled look about him. I never knew what it was about him but he just drew me in. Maybe it was his hands and the grace they held as he smoked. Maybe it was the calming attributes that he held. Or maybe it was the way we sat together in silence and never felt the need to talk. Maybe it was just him.

But without a doubt, he was always sitting in the hidden courtyard. Perhaps he was waiting, perhaps he was watching the world mover, or perhaps he was just resting and was on a break. I might have never of known if it wasn't for that fateful day.

It had been a Thursday, the day itself actually had no significance whatsoever but I still have it noted somewhere that it was a Thursday. The courtyard was empty when I had first arrived their at my secret corner of the school. I had always had a habit of turning up early to enjoy the quietness of that small corner of my school, away from all the students who were loud and abrasive, away from the crowded hallways in the boarding house, away from the teachers, away from my anxieties.

The courtyard our secret sanctuary. We sat in silence with each other, comfortably. We didn't talk, it was just us, the sun in the sky, and the small courtyard hidden by the shrubbery around us.

But that Thursday was different, I don't know what had changed, but something had. Maybe it was the way he was jittering, his figure shaking in the slightest way. Maybe it was his hands, how the paint had seemingly been misplaced from its usual home between the crevices of his skin. Maybe it was even the way he held the cigarette, clenching it's contents and crushing it before it had lit up.

But it was most likely the fact he had started talking.