incandescent » phan

•prologue•

For everyone else, the world is aglow, but for Dan Howell, it's always been dark. 

He lives in a world where everyone is surrounded with a halo of light that changes colors and intensity with mood and thought. They go through life radiant, scattering light as they go. 

Everyone, that is, but Dan. 

He was born without a glow. Even as his mother held him for the first time, she screamed at his absence of light. "My son," she had sobbed. "Will he ever be normal?"

No. The answer had been no. 

He's gone through life alone, always the one in the back of the classroom whom no one pays attention to. 

If only someone had really looked—looked past the light that wasn't there to the darkness within.

And now, twenty-four years later, nothing has changed. He is an outcast, shunned by all but his family, and even they hold him at arm's length. He has no one, no one at all to help him, to comfort him when the night terrors come or when he collapses against his bedroom wall, helpless as the tears overtake him yet again.

No one is there for him now, as he stands before his mirror, hating the sight of himself. Dan's room is much like himself, or at least how he sees himself—dark, dull, uninviting, with nothing for embellishment. Plain. The gray walls act as a contrasting background for his face framed in the glass.

His brown eyes trace the unlit contours of his face and shoulders for the umpteenth time, and the shape of his body is remarkably repulsive to him. Something about this time breaks him—he's not sure whether it's because he's seen himself in this light too many times or because he's simply weaker today—but it's a compound of things for sure. 

He looks himself hard in the eyes, as if searching the deep brown pools for some sort of weakness.

He finds it.

Dan has been taught to be observant. When no one pays attention to you, you have to learn to do things yourself. No subject is more easily observable than one's self.

And he sees within himself deep insecurity, sorrow, and a simple, almost childlike need to be accepted, to be normal.

 Who are you kidding? he asks himself. Normal is unattainable for you.

Dan shatters.

Tears run down his face as he collapses, grabbing at his chest for want of breath. He sobs as a bleak future seems to unroll itself before him. Never has his grief been this acute, this damaging. As he curls into a ball of wretched humanity, he knows, feels, that no one will ever take notice of him, never care to ask why he's silent and has such sadness radiating from him.

Who could want a boy who doesn't shine?