"What did you wish for?" they would always ask, and I would simply smile.

It had been years since that day. Looking back through the memories of my life, I always marveled at the twists and turns my life had taken. Orphaned at only five months old. Foster parents murdered before I turned three. A solid decade of a downward spiral. Bad choices, the wrong kind of friends, drugs, delinquency. Court-mandated therapy that finally shook the grip of those early years.

Until I was seventeen, when Wit came back into my life. They had been the one who got me into drugs. They had been the one I first gave my heart to, along with my virginity. They had been the one who killed that crazy dealer who tried to drag me into an alley and rape me. They had been the one who left me for the cops to blame.

Wit had been everything wrong and everything right in my life, and they were back.

"Go to the genie," they told me, their eyes half-lidded in that try-to-make-me-care way. "Everyone does it. Go to the genie."

I knew it was a bad idea because Wit was the one telling me to do it, but I did it anyway. Therapy could fix a lot of things, but not who I was. At least, not fast enough.

The year with Wit hooked me with barbs. I said no to a god-damned lot. Said yes to a fair few. I loved Wit. I hated Wit. And the day I turned eighteen, I followed Wit up the mountain.

It had been years since that day. I now walk the world in freedom--free from my demons, free from my struggles, free from my past. When the petitioners at the base of the mountain saw the great beam of light shoot into the sky, they all marveled. They knew that the world would never be the same. For centuries, the genie had denied every wish. Every wish can only be wished once, they would always say, and so everyone left with nothing but the determination to try again next year.

But the beacon in the sky meant a wish had been granted. Whoever walked off the mountain would be famous. They would be hounded for all their life by those clamoring to know what wish had been so unique. It was a new era.

But I never told them. I could not lie, for I was bound to truth, and so every time they asked what I had wished for, I told them nothing. After all, I had not been the one to make the wish. I had merely granted it.

But Wit saw now that I was happy in a way they had never been able to make me. They knew something was up. And so Wit never gave up asking.

Even now, decades later, as Wit lay old and fragile on their deathbed, and I sat by their side as hale as I was in the days of our youth, they asked, desperate for an answer.

"What did you wish for?"

I simply smiled.