What i realise now is that the story actually did have a happy ending: the children came back. In spite of everything the adults did to them, the children found their own way home, their pockets full of precious stones and pearls that gleamed and shone in the light.

But you still need the two: the dark and the light. You can't see one without the other.

There is always that choice, the light or the dark

Some things get lost others return. That is how it is: the way of things.

You're not really in control, not with this falling-for-people stuff. You don't plan who you're going to fall in love with. It's all random - chance accidents of time and place.

There's this rushing sound, like white noise.The sound of nothing.

I don't believe in the white spectre-type of ghosts you get in stories, but what if ghosts are something else? Like memories somehow caught and trapped in time, released by being in certain places where things first happened.

Memories come back, pressing in on you, like ghost faces in the darkness pushing up the glass, trying to get into the lit room.