"Into Thin Air" by Cara ´Empress of the Universe´ Jackson

I'm here, and not here. I am a specter, a shade, a poor shadow of what I once was. Not a ghost. To become a ghost you have to die, and I never did. I just faded away to almost nothing, faded away in the city, the choking, close city, where the light never shines, but all too brightly. Faded away in the box which was my home. Faded away...

Sometimes I remember what made me fade, what was so horrible there that it forced me to lose pieces of myself one by one... but even those memories are fading.

I remember... I remember a man. My... my father. How he hated me after Mom died... how he hated the sight of me. I remember the closet, the dark hole, that I was locked away in, fading in the inky darkness, wasting away.

But the darkness was better than the light. Nothing ever happened in the dark. Then the door would open and the stabbing light would pierce through my brain, and...

People at school often asked about the bruises. I couldn't tell them. He would kill me if I did. Eventually they stopped asking. I faded from their lives as completely as I faded from their world, and they didn't notice when I was gone.

And go I did. Eventually there was no substance left to me. I was nothing but a shadow, perhaps even less than that. I slipped through the closet door, and I was free. Nothing, not even a body, held me to that place.

They thought I disappeared into thin air. It wasn't true, not exactly. I am the air now. The air and the trees and especially the shadows. The wind blows through me, and I am the wind. I see the squirrel leaping, and I am the squirrel. I am the birds and the butterflies, the frogs and the snakes, the sky and the earth. I hear the creek, and I am the creek, cheerfully burbling away.

But sometimes I remember.