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 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