traces of a pushpin

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 of 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 been that voice inside of him that rebelled. He wasn’t like everyone. There was nothing in this world that could help making 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. This realisation didn’t make him feel any better, not in the slightest. But he felt like he understood the world better now, like he opened up a little bit and now had the ability to see more than what was on his plate.

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When he grew old enough, he moved away from his family. He felt too misunderstood to stay. He regretted it a little bit and giving it another try was maybe even worth it, living with his parents and little sister, that was. 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. Everything he saw, thought and went through was useful, when he found the strength to do something creative, every few months. Nothing can be created from nothing and everything starts somewhere.
He moved around a lot, tried to 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. These days there 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 them. 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, 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 about 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 to complete it’s task for all eternity.

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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 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? It could all be 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. What if everyone felt like he did, 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. It had been months since he had last been sure that he was living. He felt like a zombie most of the time, dragging his tired body around sluggishly, numbed by medication and the feeling that his existance didn't make a different to the world, that any attempt to have an influence on anything was a fight against windmills. He didn't even want to change the world, all he wanted was to know that he could.

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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 walking, but too far away to make out any details yet. An impulse was triggered within him. One of his obsessions were ceilings, this was the second. Roughly speaking, it was pets, any kind. It came in many forms and thoughts, but it had started with a weird, morbid obsession with death in general. He stopped walking, sat down on a tree stump and remembered. He had the time to. He was alone in the woods, 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 dog. A few days later, he found he animal. 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. It kept him awake that night anyway. 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 canine. 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. Then he grew angry, thinking that this thing had something that he hadn’t. Then he was jaleous. First just because people seemed to like the dog, 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 that both of these things 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, or especially, after they were gone. He had thought that this dog 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. For years now he religiously collected every missing pet 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.

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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 pet liked to go, whatever species it might be. 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 light blue bird 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 pet 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 with a hint of sweetness, and that combination 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 animal and the paper that was still in the pocket of his thin coat,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.

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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 him. This wasn’t what he had wanted, it was a break in lonelyness 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 grasped what that person must be feeling and thinking, but knowing how the world worked didn’t mean really understanding it, not neccessarily. This was one of those cases. And now that he thought about it, it was a better proof of lonelyness 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 pet, 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 parrot was dead. Or maybe it was the first one he didn’t want to die, because it had more than every bird which came before it ever had. Even more of the things that he didn’t have. Maybe, this would be the first pet that he would bring back if he found it, just to strip it of its immortality. Though he was in discrepancy. The owner of this parrot, 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 bird had to die. If anything, he should kill it should he find it, not bring it back. It seemed to be the only way to ensure this precious bond. For the sake of the parrot, not the person.

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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 and 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? Simple 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 parrot than just the one he needed for his collection, he had pinned them onto the boards. And he thought, even if he took them down, afterwards 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 forever, telling an unexplainable story to whoever moved into this flat when he was gone. 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. He was able to close his eyes and 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 the next 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. 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.

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There was the parrot. It saw him, but didn’t mind and drank from the water. He stopped aprubtly 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 bird 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 pet and his place in the world.



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This animal wasn’t allowed to die, he stood by that decision. Now that he picked a personal fight with that parrot, 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 icy blue parrot got its way anyway. He couldn't have that. Somehow, he had to make sure they were reunited, or else he feared the sudden tenseness, which had taken a hold of his bones once he actually saw it, would never go away. He thought of many ways he could do this, like picking it up and bringing it to the spot with the poster, hoping it would stay there. If it even let him and didn't fly away before he could approach. Or leaving a note, saying that he had seen it by the miniature river which 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. Putting it into words was impossible, when he had been asked what he experienced in these moments, all he could think of was emptiness, his mind went blank. Because that was the essence of it. Thoughts were hollow unlike actions, and those he was currently 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 were the same thoughts as before, repeated in a loop. What to do about the bird? 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 bird, 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 bird. But if they don’t find it by the water.. They would find it if it flew 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 hurt 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 bird. 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.

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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.

will work over the navigation here again. want the < page and page > buttons in the grey bar at the bottom istead of in these textboxes, which will also be shorter once i move these page buttons out of here. meaning the same amount of space between textbox, top and bottom. im sure you know what i mean. anyway, now that i have the page layout i can correct the final draft of my chapters and make them fit to the size of these boxes.