There is a weird sense of peace within walking through the woods alone. He realised that when he finally tried it for himself. Before, he had spent his time sitting inside his room, thinking depressive thoughts as always, but once he actually started to go outside, he felt like he could breathe in deeper, like his lungs suddenly had more capacity. It was probably just the temperature of the air he sucked in, just a trick that his mind played on him, or something psychological- but it made him feel a little single minded. Throughout all his teen years his family had told him that he would feel better if he just went outside, either to socialize or to take walks, but he always refused. Hearing so many people tell him to do it, there had always been that voice inside of him that rebelled. He wasn’t like everyone. There was nothing in this world that could help him and make him feel better, that he had been sure of. Discovering that he had been wrong and they had been right, that stung. It was the most basic advice someone gave you when you tried to explain how empty you felt inside all the time. Exactly the advice someone would give you, who never went through what you are going through. How could they have been so right, if they couldn’t begin to comprehend what was going on inside of him? Either he wasn’t as complicated a creature as he had believed to be, or they understood him better than he had thought. Maybe, just maybe, depression wasn’t something that made him special. Maybe it was just another human emotion that everyone could relate to, if they were at least a little empathetic. Maybe the world wasn’t as black and white as he had always thought it to be. But no matter if gray tones existed in this environment that he lived in, it was still colourless and dull. It didn’t make him feel any better, not in the slightest. But he felt like he understood it better now, like he opened up a little bit and now had the ability to see more than what was on his plate.
When he grew old enough, he moved away from his family. He felt too misunderstood to stay. He regretted it a little bit, giving it another try was maybe even worth it. It wouldn’t make life better, though he might gain a few more experiences that might at least change how he saw things and helped him grow and develop. He felt like he had something to give others, it wasn’t his a reason to live, but simply something to spend his time with while he was here. Everything he saw, thought and went through was useful in that regard. Nothing can be created from nothing and everything starts somewhere.
He moved around a lot, triedto see as many different things as he could. Taking it all in while he was able to, in a sane moment. This was one of them. His walks had become the definition of sanity to him, a little solace, and most of all, a way to remind himself that he was still alive. While still there, there now were less moments were he layed in bed motionless, staring up at the wooden planks on the ceiling, either empty minded or thoughts wandering aimlessly with no connection to the body. Forgetting about time, sometimes space and needs, while he spent hours thinking about nonchalant things like the boards on his ceiling and how they might be attached, since he couldn’t see any screws or nails holding it. He wondered how the ceiling was built, that usually was the thought it started with, he tried to imagine how it might have been done, tried to grasp the concept but never knew if it was realistic or not, because he was not a carpenter, didn’t know anyone he could ask and couldn’t be bothered to go to a library and lend a book about house building to look it up. No, he tried to come up with new ideas on how one might go about attaching wooden planks to a ceiling without visibly screwing them onto the beams that must be underneath -or from his perspective above- them. And then he forgot the world around himself and got lost. He often found himself thinking the same things as last time, and the time before that and the time before that, as if his mind was too empty to come up with new things. As if either he didn’t have enough energy left to think creativily, or like he was dead. Creativity was something that belonged to the living, and while sometimes he had a lot of it, other times he didn’t. He just repeated the same thought processes over and over, like a machine that was stuck in a loop. A computer that tried to delete a file that is currently in use, failed because of it’s restrictions and started over mindlessly, trying could complete it’s task for all eternity.
But going outside, that was different. Looking at nature, more specifically the woods. Especially when everything was bleak and dead, brown and black trees between white snow or half rotten leaves on the ground. Almost all colour had been absorbed and nothing but sadness and death was left to see for anyone who wandered through them. It felt close to home. He related, sympathised. This was what he would draw, if someone asked him to depict how he felt. Something that was once alive, maybe even still is, the trees might become green and show signs of life again, but when you took walks like this, day after day and saw how nothing changed, you started to wonder if time really did exist. You couldn’t remember what living trees looked like, you wondered if maybe they were just a myth and nothing was ever going to change. Happiness was such a myth to him. He could barely remember it, he only ever heard about it in tales by others. Realistically he should know that it existed, he saw other people which were happy, he should know that he might one day be able to feel it, but in a nihilistic kind of way he started to doubt it. He doubted it because he had no real proof. Who told him that what he saw in other people was true? Maybe it was all a lie. A mask they put up to fit in with a society that expected them to be happy. Who knew what really lied underneath. Maybe everyone felt like himself, deep inside, and he just lacked the energy and understanding to mimick something that wasn’t really there. Maybe that was why people had been able to tell him he would find peace in the outside world, that existing would be a little bit easier when he could breathe fresh oxygen instead of the used up air that collected inside of his little room with the wooden ceiling boards, when he laid motionless for hours without opening the window for some air exchange. Or there was a biological reason for it and it was true that his brain needed oxygen to function. That would mean that he actually was in fact alive, and not dead. Or it meant that he was alive while he was outside, and dead while inside.
He stopped abruptly when he saw something out of place. Every now and then this happened and it was the reason he left his four walls in the first place. A little sensation, a little tickle in the brain, the thing that didn’t happen while he was dead, the embodiment of life. There was a paper pinned to a tree not far from where he was standing, but too far away to make anything out yet. An impulse was triggered within him. One of his obsessions were ceilings, this was the second. Roughly speaking, it was cats. It came in many forms and thoughts, but it had started with a weird, morbid obsession with death in general. He remembered. He had the time to. He was alone in the woods and had nowhere to be, and nothing else to do. He vividly remembered how as a child he walked the area he grew up in with his family. He saw a poster for a missing cat. A few days later, he found he cat. It had been hit by a car. He remembered stopping to stare at it, but they had pulled him along, because his family did not want him to see something like that, but it kept him awake that night. This animal, someone had loved and missed it enough to put up those posters. His young and childish mind had wondered if his family would do the same. And somehow, he had come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t. He had envied the cat. He snuck out that same night to come back for it, and he squatted down on the sidewalk and looked at it for a pretty long time. He grew angry, thinking that thing had something that he hadn’t. And he was jaleous. First just because people seemed to like the cat, because someone wanted it and he himself felt unwanted. That had been short after the incident that he didn’t like to think about, but he knew it was the thing that had shaped the whole personality that he was today. He had seen the grave of a pet once, he knew the animal would be missed. People loved their pets, even after they were gone. He had thought that this cat would live on in peoples memories longer than he would, and while today he knew this wasn’t true, back then he believed it. He now knew that memories and experiences stuck with people and understood how he came to- not even resent but envy these animals. He collected every missing cat poster that he might find on his walks, and there were many, at least on trees close to the trampled desire paths that many people seemed to wander.
This wasn’t one of these paths, he was in the middle of nowhere. He figured it must be someone who knew the places their cat liked to go. Someone who knew their pet so well, understood them deeply, that they came all this way out here to hang up a poster. So he came closer. Grabbed the paper and ripped it off the tree. He hadn’t been far off from the truth, he figured. It was a picture of a snow white cat with a phone number underneath. He folded the sheet carefully and slid it into his pocket. This one seemed to have a story. It would be a cherished part of his collection. Emotionally, it became valuable to him on the spot. It wasn’t more than a missing poster, but he understood that the bond between this person and their cat must be very deep. It fascinated him. And of course he wondered if the animal was dead yet. He hoped it was. Because then it could be sure that it was missed, and that the person would think about it time and time again. He imagined that maybe, the person would start to religiously go on walks and come here, just to remember. Maybe even put up a memorial. It was a bitter imagination, but that bitterness was something so familiar to him that he mainly saw the beauty in it. He felt something, a little something that he couldn’t pin down. But it was proof that he was alive. A little thing, no more no less, but one of greater importance than most big events within his life, and he was sure that he would remember it for a long long time, maybe forever, if something with as much weight as eternity even existed.

There was a new poster the next day. He was still thinking about the paper and the animal so he went back to the spot, and now he was hooked. He stood there and stared at it bluntly for quite a while. He must have been right. This person walked around every day and replaced the posters that were gone, even in a place like this, in the middle of nowhere. No, actually there were a few houses not too far away, but you couldn’t see them from here or the surrounding area at all, and it really made him feel like he was at the edge of the world with no one around him. He had picked this spot to move to because of that, because of the walks he could have here, and because one thing came to another and he just ended up here, but he couldn’t deny that there had been some purpose to it.
Only this wasn’t the edge of the world, apparently. Someone walked the same path he did, while living in totally different circumstances, probably having completely different thoughts than he did. This wasn’t what he had wanted, it was a break in lonelinesslonelyness and solitude, but it was alright, because it brought him something new. Something to think about, something to interact with without actually having to interact with a living being. He didn’t feel too close to them anyway. Especially one that was able of so much love and affection for another living thing. He couldn’t quite understand it. Of course he graspedge grasped what that person must be feeling and thinking, but understanding how the world worked didn’t mean really understanding it, not necessarilyneccessarily. This was one of those cases. And now that he thought about it, it was a better proof of loneliness and solitude than the woods could ever provide, because he felt more distant from other people than ever before in his life. This person must be his complete opposite, in all ways that mattered. And he didn’t want to meet them, no matter who they were. He would rather spend ten hours in a room full of dozens of people than a minute with this person. He started to build up resentment, the thing that he could never feel towards a cat, and it was funny. Per definition, everything he felt towards them would count as hate, but it wasn’t what it was. Wanting them dead had nothing to do with how much affection he could feel towards them, even if he envied them, wished they didn’t exist, as if someone had created them purely out of spite to remind him of his own misery. Nothing made him feel closer to happiness than seeing a dead one. Except for maybe this paper pinned to a tree in front of him. No, one thing would. If this exact cat were dead. Or maybe it was the first one he didn’t want to die, because it had more than every cat that came before it ever did. Even more of the things that he didn’t have. Maybe, this would be the first cat that he would bringbrng back if he found it, just to strip it of its immortality. But he was in a discrepancyin discrepancy. The owner of this cat, while he didn’t wish much for any person that he had ever heard of, was different. Because of their meaning to him. Somehow, their bond to their pet meant a lot to him and to preserve that, the cat had to die.
He took this paper off the tree too. Only to find a new one back in place the next day. While time rushed past him like it always had, it became a sort of race for him. He would come back to remove the papers and the pet owner would come back to hang up more. One day there were two and after he ripped those off too, there were a dozen. He saw it from far away but when he was there, he spinned around very slowly, and it felt like the papers were looking at him from everywhere. Who would do this? SimplySimple put, he would. It must be someone who was obsessive about the whole thing. He felt mocked. And he removed the papers again, once he had stared at them blankly for so long that it turned dark and he felt his fingers first turn cold, then lost feeling completely.
At home, he spent the nights laying on his bed and staring up at his ceiling. Since he now had a lot more missing papers of this cat than just the one he needed for his collection, he had pinned them onto the boards. And he thought, even after he took them down, he would still be able to see the little holes the pins had punched into the wood, so no matter what he did, the traces of what was happening would always be there, left behind for all eternity. While no one would be able to tell how they came to be and what the story behind them was, they would still always remain. They would taunt him while he was still on this earth, but beyond that, they were a little mark that he left, proof he had been here, and somehow a validation of his emotions. Once he realised that, a sudden peace set in and for the first time in a long while, the ceiling boards meant something positive to him. His eyes closed, and he was able to fall asleep surrounded by darkness instead of laying awake until long after dawn, when his body gave into exhaustion.
Something changed. He feared change. He didn’t dislike it, but it brought risks and needed time getting used to. He got up early in the morning and went back to the woods. Arrived apparently before the pet owner did and hung one missing poster back up, almost like an apology. He did it out of a deep appreciation though, for that short moment of peace it had given him. He stopped to remove the papers on his walks, but this was just about this one specific cat, a zebra case so to speak, everyone else he would still treat them the same. One cat and their owner didn’t speak for all of them. On his way back home he took a different, longer route than usual and when he crossed a little trickle, he realised that the change he was going through went deeper than he would have imagined.
There was the cat. It saw him, but didn’t mind and drank from the water. He stopped abruptlyaprubtly and felt his whole world turn upside down. Suddenly, the situation became real. It was more than just the little thoughts inside his head. His actions had consequences and there was a real person out there looking for this cat and here he had been removing papers everywhere he went. He didn’t regret it. He just realised that once again, things weren’t what he had thought they were. This happened all the time and was probably normal, but he wished he could understand himself and the world in a way that this didn’t have to happen. He went home, slowly, thinking about the cat and his place in the world.
This animal wasn’t allowed to die, he stood by that decision. He picked a personal fight with that cat and he decided that he was going to outlive it. At the same time, if the owner never found it, they would eventually assume it had passed and that would mean that the snow white cat got its way anyway. Somehow, he had to make sure they were reunited, or else he feared the sudden tenseness that had taken a hold of his bones when he saw it would never go away. He thought of many ways he could do this. Pick it up and bring it to the spot with the poster, hoping it would stay there. Leaving a note that he had seen it by the miniature river he passed by on his way home. But his limbs felt heavy and he didn’t have the energy to even move a toe or blink often enough. He felt his eyes go dry, like so many times before, he knew he was deep in the spiral, the feeling of death, with his mind wide awake and racing. Not that he could ever put it into words, when he had been asked what he experienced in these moments all he could think of were emptiness. Because that was the essence of it. Thoughts were hollow unlike actions, and those he was incapable of. He tried to come up with a solution, but soon his mental energy was depleted and all that the machine in his head would spit out wereout, were the same thoughts as before, repeated in a loop. What to do about the cat? Could pick it up and bring it to the poster, hoping it will stay there. Could also leave a note saying where I found it. No, to do that I’ll have to move and I can’t. But I have to do something about the cat, or else I might not outlive it. And I have to outlive it. I have to bring them back together. But how do I do that? I have to make sure they find the cat. But if they don’t find it by the water.. They would find it if it wandered over to the poster. I could pick it up and bring it there. Or let them know where I saw it. But to do that I need to be able to move my muscles first. And that won’t work. My eyes are dry. I feel sore. My muscles are gonna be sore tomorrow. I can’t move but my muscles are under pressure. I don’t want to feel like this. I have to do something about the cat. I have to reunite them to stop this feeling. But I can’t move. To become able to move, I need to move. But I can’t move. I will have to lay here forever. I will never be able to get up. I will die here.
He sat up, all of a sudden. It was dark outside. With no idea how much time had passed, he decided that he had to do something right now, or he would fall back into a trance. He grabbed onto a piece of furniture and pulled himself up onto his feet. Somehow he managed to walk and next thing he found himself in front of the telephone. He dialed the number he had read so many times it felt like it was burned into his brain. Or scratched into a thick layer of ice that never melts, bound to remain in this frozen wasteland forever. Someone picked up. A voice on the other end. It said something, but he had no idea what. He forgot what he wanted to say. He had never known which words to use exactly, and he couldn’t think of any now. All there was, was his heavy breathing into the phone, then a pained cough and then the connection was broken. His throat was almost as sore as his muscles were, he hadn’t had anything to drink all day. He dragged himself to the bathroom to drink from the tab and take a piss, then leaned the back of his head against the cold tiles and closed his eyes.

Okay, yesterday hadn’t gone so well but surely today would be better. He woke up with a clear head and realised that somehow he had opened his window last night, so the air was cold and fresh. He was shivering a little. But at least he seemed to be back under the living and ready to do something about the cat. He grabbed something to eat and drink, not without noticing that he had to stock up on food again soon, and took a good long thought about what to do now. While taking deep breaths, he felt much better. He didn’t dare call the cat owner again, after how much he must have scared them last night. Instead, he made a cup of black coffee and when it was done he grabbed it and brought it along on another walk. First he would go to the trickle, then to the poster spot. He brought a pen, just in case. Now, he had to check where this cat was, so he could somehow bring it back to its owner.
When he approached the spot where he had seen the cat, he felt how his heart rate went up. He was nervous. Realistically speaking, it was just an animal, yes. But finding it would mean he had to interact with the owner. He didn’t do that very often. He wasn’t exactly socially awkward, interactions were usually fine, since he didn’t mind what people thought of him. But he cared a little bit now. All that he had was a phone number and he must have come across like a creep last night and he had to somehow make sure they didn’t immediately hang up on him because they recognised the number.
The cat wasn’t there. So he contemplated if he should even leave a hint on the poster, if the cat was gone now. Maybe it would come back. He found himself a good little spot to sit down on a fallen tree and waited, with his coffee cup in hand, now only luke warm, soon cold. He wished he would have brought his walkman. On better days like this he would sometimes listen to music, but it happened less often than you would think. Most of the time, his head was so full and busy that he needed the silence. It brought him peace. He imagined that pure silence was everything that waited for you when you were dead. No rustling of leaves, no sounds whatsoever. And since it was this time of the year where no trees bore any leaves, it sounded exactly like death in these woods. But he didn’t feel dead right now and he would like some sounds but there was nothing, and honestly it was driving him insane today. While he walked, at least he could hear his footsteps.
He sat there for a while, until the cat actually showed up. But as soon as he climbed on his feet, it ran away. Today it was scared of him. Great, he thought. But he wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. He doubted that the cat would let him pick it up. At least now he knew that the animal came back here, so he made his way to the poster spot and was unbelievably glad that at least he could listen to the sound of his footsteps now and not only the sounds of death.
He did what he had to. He left a note in marker on the missing poster, headed home and went out again to buy groceries in the little store their village had. Who knew when the next good day would be. He brought a big bag to fill it up with as many things as he could carry home. He dragged himself through the aisles of the store slowly and took a lot of time to think about what he should take. He wasn’t in a rush and liked to give his brain a break every now and then so it wouldn’t get overworked. He did everything kind of slowly if he had the chance. A few bags of stuff here, a can there, all things that wouldn’t go bad if he forgot to put them in the fridge, left them standing around open or put them on the kitchen counter when he thought about preparing a meal and then changed his mind. It happened often, yet he didn’t seem to become any thinner and honestly it must look quite funny, a chubby guy like him hauling tons of food into his basket as if he was preparing for the end of the world to come. Honestly he wouldn’t mind it. One time he had to sit through a snowstorm for well over a week and couldn’t go anywhere, had to live purely from what he had in the house and with no electricity.
After a look into the full basket, he took out his wallet and counted his money. It would be enough, he figured. But he probably had to watch over his finances a bit until the end of the month. It was barely the middle of January, was it? Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t taken a look at a calendar in quite a while and his sense of time often played tricks on him. He should ask someone for the date. He didn’t quite like talking, but in this case it was his best bet. Before he forgot, since he could also turn on the radio or TV, but he already knew that his mind would be occupied with other things by the time he was back inside his own four walls. So he looked up and took a few steps to the end of the aisle in hopes of spotting a nice old lady from far away who wouldn’t give him weird looks and make everything much easier. He saw someone, but immediately got distracted by someone else.
Through the big windows at the front of the store, he saw something interesting. Someone was hanging up a sheet of paper. The head of this person was directly behind the poster, so he couldn’t make out anything except for a rather slim build and black clothes. He made haste to disappear behind the next aisle and get out of view quickly, as if he was worried this person might recognise him as the caller from last night.
It took him a few seconds to calm himself, but then he went about his business as usual. He strolled around with the speed of a zombie and picked a pack of roasted sunflower seeds to snack on later, wasting time until he was sure the presumable cat owner was gone. On his way out he checked and for sure, it was a poster of the same snow white cat. He felt like he dodged a bullet and hoped they would find it soon so he could put everything behind himself. He didn’t want to deal withwith it any of this. He only wanted to remember it, without any urgency or the situation changing.

No new missing cat poster. He made it. They had been reunited. Finally, he could put everything behind himself, he thought. But only until he saw that there was something else that was new and out of place, sitting between the roots of the tree, in the snow. At first he almost didn’t notice it, because some fresh snow had collected on top of it. It was a small wooden basket, from a very pale material. It took him a while to come closer and actually inspect the thing.
He had hoped that the help would be accepted in silent appreciation, but apparently not. The person he had seen yesterday apparently felt the need to thank him. Well, he didn’t know for sure it was exactly that person. Maybe it was a whole family looking for their cat. Come to think of it, he was surprised to be thanked at all, after all he had ripped off a lot of the posters and hindered them in finding their cat more than he helped. Tho he doubted many other people took walks around here who could have seen both the poster and the cat. Maybe they thought the poster thief and the mysterious helper were two different people. Maybe they thought the posters had been removed by the local forest ranger or something. He didn’t know. Too many possibilities. All he knew was that apparently someone wanted to thank him, and he wasn’t quite sure if he deserved that- but he decided to stop being a depressive jerk about it and extended his hand to wipe the snow off the basket, which was covered by fabric of the same colour as the snow. If he didn’t took it, it would just rot here. There was no point in leaving it here. No one would be helped. Plus, wasn’t it rude not to accept gifts? Someone else decided that he deserved this, who was he to judge?
Back home, he unpacked the basket and was able to make it an actually cozy afternoon. Inside he found a candle that he put on, a hand full of homemade cookies which tasted much better than anything he could get off the store, and a last surprise below all of that. On topic of the cookies though, he remembered his own family doing things like this. And he missed it, just a little bit. Ever since he stopped feeling all negative about them, he had been hoping they would give him a call so he could exchange a few nive words, maybe even tell them they had been right, about the walks, the fresh air, express gratitude himself and admit that he didn’t dislike them, as they probably thought he did. Just come back closer together. But they never did. Maybe they had lost his number. He had moved so many times. Or had he forgotten to let them know his current telephone number? They had his address, that much was for sure. Every month, he still received an envelope with some money to keep himself alive. He could be glad they did this. It was the only reason he hadn’t starved yet.
When he snapped out of thoughts about his own family, he took another cookie from the basket and looked into the little flame. It threw yellow shades onto the wooden boards of his room. The sun was starting to set and everything was a mix of yellow, orange and red. The wood looked much more saturated than usual. The colours flickered, shapes moved faster than he could try to see anything within them. It felt like a higher difficulty version of cloudgazing. He felt his brain go dizzy pretty quickly, by all the sudden movements on his walls. All the while the knotholes stayed in place, dark little spots between all the colour, as if the coziness and warmth had begun to mold, as if it got sick, and something was eating away at the warmth and happiness. Oh no, more sad thoughts. He should pull himself together.
So he tore his gaze off the wall, reached into the basket again and froze when he noticed that there was something else below the edible items. Curiosity got to him before anxiety did and he pulled a blurry polaroid out. Held it up to inspect it closely in the dim light of his gifted candle and the pinkish, setting sun. It depicted a young, pretty pale man holding a white cat on his arms. He was smiling. He looked genuinely happy, that kind of happiness that people couldn’t hide even if they wanted to, because it came so aprubtly. The person looked about the same as the one he had seen the day prior, at the store, hanging up another missing poster. A slim build and dressed in all black, except now he could also see shaggy black hair and some piercings. The eyes were red. For a moment he sat there trying fo gigure out if they really were or if it was just a quirky thing the camera did when using a flash, but he didn’t come to a clear conclusion. Behind him he saw what seemed to be an open front door and on the shoulders of his jacket, some snow had collected. A few flakes also got stuck in his hair. This picture fully fullfilled it’s purpose, because he could absolutely see the situation in front of his inner eyes. The man came back from his usual tour of checking on the posters, only this time he actually brought the animal home. He was beaming from one ear to another. His family, who must have thought they would never get the animal back, it had been at least two weeks now after all, must have grabbed their polaroid camera to take a picture as proof of this moment. And later someone must have decided to put it here, into the basket, to tell him that the cat found its way home safely, plus to show him what he actually did. He didn’t just bring an animal home, he made someone happy, truly happy, even though they were a complete stranger. Someone out there would forever remember this kind stranger who helped to get a beloved pet back. He had made an impact on someones life, and not a small one. And with this picture, he would also be able to remember it. Because without this, he wouldn’t have been able to realize the weight of this situation and next time he laid alone, awake at night and stared up at the ceiling boards, he would again think that no one would ever notice if he disappeared and that it wouldn’t matter anyway, because he had never before done any good for anyone and that it also wouldn’t change in the future. But had he died long ago like he often hoped he would, this person would not have this happy moment to think back on when they laid alone, awake at night and stared up at their ceiling.
Without noticing it, he had started to sob and slowly put the picture back into the basket. He sat on a big armchair which would have fit two guys of his built. Now he pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his thin arms around them. This didn’t feel right. He crossed paths with all different kinds of people often. At the store, passed them on the streets or on walks. But he never thought that his life would get seriously intertwined with someone else’s who seemed to be so fundamentally different from himself. Even though he should have known that it would happen eventually. If someone dropped a wallet in front of him, he would also return it. It had just been a matter of time.
While the whole thing felt dizzy and hazy to him, far away, as all this happiness seemed to exist in a completely different world than his, he couldn’t fully grasp it. But he knew one thing, he had done this for the owner, for this guy, but not for the cat. And he wished he could have pulled this off without doing the cat any good. It didn’t deserve it. He burned a hole into the picture. He burned out the cat, hefore he pinned it to the ceiling, between all the extra missing papers he had collected. And instead of taking them down he left them there. He looked at them often times from then on, and when he moved he took them with him, to hang them up again on the next ceiling. Even if this was over, it had become an important part of him, shaped him almost as much as the ceiling boards that he looked up to so often and thought of death, as the dead twigs of the forest he liked to wander around in to remember that he was alive, as the incident that he didn’t like to think about but that definitely had shaped him, and as the first dead cat he saw, which had taught him all the insecurities that he carried deep down until this day and would probably never get rid of. This polaroid reminded him that change existed. Pets could get lost, pets could come back. Connections could form in the most desolate ways. He could change. He didn’t only cause pain and suffering. And most of all, if he could change, then so could the dead snowy forests. It meant that time existed and eventually the snow would melt, the leaves would come back and happiness wasn’t just a myth. He had been wrong again.
But as positive as this experience was, spring was still very far away and he was not sure if he could hold out long enough to see the forest thaw.