Colourless Souls

Imagine, imagine yourself plucked from your familial mantle of love and security, being deposited in an unknown and hostile place. Unfamiliar faces, alien environs, uncountable rules the framework of your new existence. And all the while oblivious to the difference between you and them, a difference that they see only too well but through your innocuous eyes an insignificant irrelevance. How happy would you be then, on the first day of such an unceremonious and brutal installation in such a regime, to find yourself befriended by a veteran of such circumstance, a spirit kindred and reflecting almost at once your own? How happy would you be to find support and comfort in the most improbable of places? Imagine being contained within that place, no-where to go, no-where to run for a decade or more, imagine how you would feel. And now imagine that the version of you so imagined is the 6 year old version of your current self. Imagine...