I was fourteen, living a life which now I look back was damn near perfect. Not much ever went wrong, and nothing went so wrong that by the next day it wasn’t right again. The days were predictably long and sunny, even in winter. I was having a good time being alive, I just didn’t realise it until later on.

There isn’t much I wanted to do. I was doing everything I wanted to when I wanted, so plans had a short quality which led to satisfaction quickly. You’d think I made trouble, like everyone does at that age. Or at least everyone who gets into stories. I didn’t. The only thing I remember was throwing some firecrackers over an old man’s fence, but later on I apologised because I saw he wasn’t half as mean as we had convinced ourselves that he was. There was another reason I apologised as well. I was apologising to a lot of people then, for no reasons that they knew and I only had a vague awareness of them.

Through this world, populated by street corners and faces of the faceless I went, looking neither left nor right, just out, up and down. The world happened in three streets, and anything outside that didn’t matter because it was too far away. At the time I didn’t think about it, because I saw the "Grown ups" and I was sure that when I turned into one of them I’d frown and tut over newspapers as they did. I knew it would happen, it was just a matter of when.

Years passed. Five, which, in the history of the world, is just how long the First World War 1 was. But in those five years I watched the world happening, and the niggling feeling grew that I was missing something fundamental. I saw people read the newspapers, but they read the sports pages instead of the genocide on the front page. I sat back and watched as people did what they had to. Cries of "will you go out with me?" and "Did you see so-and-so" haunted my world, floating into my ears and out the other side.

Everything slowly started to unravel, the order of the early days, the simplicity was replaced by a similar simplicity which was more terrible because it was in the place of thought. I watched as people grew up, but didn’t grow brains. Spoon-fed a diet of facts and punishments no one questioned more than the school. Don’t blame the teachers, people said. But if you can’t blame those who are supposed to know more than you, who can you blame? If you say they don’t know more than you, then you become the teacher.

Looking beyond the confines of the concrete jungle nothing is clearer. I saw that no one knew what they should be doing, and most faces speak of disappointment and a kind of desperate seeking of direction. I read book after book about men who killed dragons, but they never explained what happened to the people the dragon had burnt, or what happened after the dragon was dead. And once again people would quickly remind you that dragons don’t exist. So, I thought, how is anyone supposed to make a difference? If there is nothing to slay and no threat to combat what are we to do with our time? There’s nothing to do, and nowhere to do it.

And it was when I realised that that I changed beyond what I knew to be normal. I tried to explain to people about what I had discovered, but no one listened, and they just laughed and threw stale thoughts of freedom back at me. A fear gripped my soul. A fear of everyone around me, because I saw they knew nothing of themselves. I bared it until I could bare it no longer, and in the final moments hundreds of thoughts ran through my head, chasing the elusive shades of humanity that was as make-believe as the dragons in the stories.