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I’m always on time, and I never hand things in late. That’s the way my mother taught me. Shepherds are the same. If they don’t stick to their schedule, the sheep go completely bananas.
And ever since I was little my mother had told me, if you don’t know something, go to the library and look it up.
Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?
“Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that’s why. They’re nice and creamy. And sort of grainy at the same time.”
“So that’s why he wants me to spend a month cramming information in there, to suck it up afterward?”
“That’s the...
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“If all they did was lend out knowledge for free, what would the payoff be for them?”
“But that doesn’t give them the right to saw off the tops of people’s heads and eat their brains. Don’t you think that’s going a bit too far?”
“You got dealt an unlucky card, that’s the long and short of it. ...
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happier. No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.
“The world follows its own course,”
“Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.”
At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness. And any anxiety that is not especially anxious is, in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning.
The tricky thing about mazes is that you don’t know if you’ve chosen the right path until the very end. If it turns out you were wrong, it’s usually too late to go back and start again. That’s the problem with mazes.
Did they really exist? How much of what I remember really happened? To be honest, I can’t be certain. All I know for sure is that I lost my shoes and my pet starling.
My mother died last Tuesday. She had been suffering from a mysterious illness, and that morning she quietly slipped away. There was a simple funeral, and now I am totally alone. No mother. No pet starling. No sheep man. No girl. I lie here by myself in the dark at two o’clock in the morning and think about that cell in the library basement. About how it feels to be alone, and the depth of the darkness surrounding me. Darkness as pitch black as the night of the new moon.
