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 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.

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 out anything yet. An impulse was triggered within him. One of his obsessions were ceilings, this was the second. Roughly speaking, it was birds. 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 parrot. A few days later, he found he bird. 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,