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.

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