Tonight I went on a walk. I didn’t bring my dog along, I just walked alone with nothing but my own thoughts to accompany me. Despite the lack of distraction that the icy night air seemed to bring, I can’t, for the life of me, remember what I thought about. Sometimes I feel like life is a lot like a dream. I just keep doing things and going through motions without any real purpose. I live a day and wake up the next morning only to forget yesterday and just keep reliving the same day. Different things happen, but the day feels the same. I guess I don’t really forget what happened in the past, but the memories carry a sort of dream-like and detached quality. Delving deeper into the past only exacerbates the feeling. Can I claim to be the main character of this strange and fragmented mental story? Why is it that when I recall the past I find myself viewing the memory from a 3rd person point of view, as though I were watching a film?

The nocturnal air was still and crisp. Whenever I look around my room, all I see is a cocoon of fuzz. The night is never fuzzy, it’s always crisp. The ground was a layered cake of concrete and ice topped with sharp, frigid powder, and stepping in the wrong place in the wrong way would cause one to slip. Needless to say, I had to tread carefully, but I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take for help to come if I did end up slipping at 10 PM on the cold February night. I walked underneath the highway bridge that served as a threshold between the paved suburban landscape and the sidewalk-less street that ran right next to the local pond and nature preserve. The rumbling the cars above me made reminded me of downtown Chicago. They also reminded me of the opening scene from the fifth Harry Potter movie featuring the dementors. I was enamored with the books at a younger age, but so many of the details have eluded me over the years. The bridge’s underneath was more muddy than icy. Droplets of water occasionally descended down upon the slush from the manufactured cave’s roof.

I arrived at the pond and encountered even more ice. I made sure not to slip as I walked past the line of concrete stubs that delineated the nature preserve’s street-ward border. I was greeted by a party of feral nomads upon entering. They stood fairly close to me. I wasn’t close enough to touch them, but I was close enough to think the deer would immediately scatter. Nevertheless, they looked at me and stood their ground. They could have been petrified for all I knew, but they appeared so serene. I took out my mobile phone and took three pictures of them. The first and last turned out blurry, but the middle photo was of acceptable quality. As I began my way back home, I whispered goodbye to the deer despite the fact that they would never understand my departing words. As I walked, I noticed a trail of small cavities in the snow that looked like deer tracks. I had followed the deer without even knowing it. Or maybe they were tracks belonging to something else. I wouldn’t really know. I don’t really know anything, to be entirely honest.

https://i.ibb.co/9NJpLgb/deer.png