An Introduction:

Well, my name is Sheppard, or Shep; and the first thing you should know is that I am no normal kid. You could say I was a brief celebrity if you include a mere few thousand readers in a market research run testing general public digestibility. But I am not a celebrity. Celebrities have to dodge reporters and wear sunglasses in public. But I live in a cell, one cell at a time, and the public is not allowed in. I am a prisoner.

A prisoner in this body, this combination of pen-strokes composing a cartoonized version of a young boy. But I am not young, nor am I old. I have no god except for my creator, although at one point he did write a deity into my life, though he never drew it. My god givith, my god taketh away.

What he giveth to me is eternal "youth", but with not a youthful mind. His other tart, "Bruno", a woman he's been faithfully drawing for years, he allows to age. But why?! Has she ever done anything for him? has she ever made him any real money? No, only prospects. She must just be an obsession. Maybe love, I wouldn't know love. I've never truly loved anything, it's not an emotion he's given. I suppose what he taketh away is my humanity.

And even that's not totally true, he did give me the emotion for love, but never a love for anything specific. He had birthed me a long while ago, and so I watched and waited, and after three years of "diddling" around (something his high-school principle accused him of doing, yes he tells these stories again and again) he finally put together a comic strip to submit for syndication. He played me across from a woman named May, to which I have no particular interest; but as a last minute addition, he cast a role for a woman (well, another "woman-creation" of his), "Dee", for me to love. But it was acting, it wasn't actual love. You can see this contrived "love" in movies, in novels, (and some say even on the outside in the "real" world in "real" relationships). He only gave me a feeling that there was something I loved in the past, so that I could method-act, so I could take this nostalgia and project it onto another object.



So I have a love, but it's never been told to me what it was for, and so it is like a forgotten memory, that you look and look and look for but can never find. He never told me what it was, and so it plummets me into darkness.

Not really though. Or not so melodramatic. Life is just life. And my life is... just a series of lines when he finds the time. What can one do, but wait for the next cell?