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, 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 parrot. 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 bird, 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 bird 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 bird 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 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