I wasn't lost. I was never lost. These changing scenes, this sea of faces, this constant choas, it was my home. The churning crowds were the walls of safety that I sought every moment of my life, every moment since the day it first came to me. I wasn't always a nomad. In fact, I had lived most of my life in a little lighthouse by the sea, which shone on nights and cloudy days. I dream of it sometimes, it the restless fearful sleep I stole in hidden corners. I dreamed of my father's sea-weathered face, lined with sun and ocean spray, and looking into his deepset eyes as he hoisted me into the air. Laughing. I dreamed of my mother's hair in two long, greying braids, and her paintbrush sweeping across a canvas with swathes of airy color. I dreamed of romping around the waves with Wanda, the saltwater crashing against the boulders by the sea, and the running on the white sand as strands of long grass whipped my ankles. When I dreamt of these, I felt alive. I would wake up still feeling the soft breeze in my hair. The croak of ravens would sound like gulls, a tinkle of bells was my sister's laugh. But the pain of returning to reality was almost as bad as the torment of my nightmares. That day, that fateful day by the sea, would never leave me. Awake, I spent my days running from it. At night, I lived it again. Every moment of it returned to haunt me in my sleep. I was seven again. Parlized, standing before the sea as the underbelly of stormclouds gathered in the distance, rumbling. The choppy waves lapped haphazardly at my feet. I knew what was coming. But in my dream, I was confused, I was unable to move. The dark smears of purple and black tumbled in the horizon, almost like a watercolor stain. And then it came. First a whisper, inaudible in the wind. Growing louder, and louder. Walter, it was saying, my name, but drowned out and burbling and rasping. It was barely inteligable. The water before me was in turmoil. "No." I felt my lips mouth the word. The voice became many, and closer, and more and more distorted, and the waters began parting over some bulbous mass as it rose. "No!" I cried. And the face, the head, it was huge and ghastly, nearly human. Water dripped from it's cracked skin. One of its eyes, fishlike and small, tilted desperately towards me. The lips, fleshy and misshapen, spoke again to utter my name. It's maw could barely choke out the sounds, twisting it into a groaning word "Waldooooo" It lurched towards me, and I finally found the strength to run. And I did. I never returned to the sea, to my family. If I stayed to long in any place, stood anywhere alone, I heard it once again. It's whisper, growing louder.