BEFORE THE SNOWDROPS DIED

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3

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"Don't be overconfident, for death is breathing down your neck."

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28.05.2023

I used to believe that the more I lived like there was no tomorrow, the closer I was to death.

Was I close to death?

For some reason my mind told me that I would never get out of here. Maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong.

But most of my thoughts were that my mind was right.

Who would cry for me if I died?

Would my aunt worry about me? She would probably shed three or five tears at my grave. But then she would be happy to be rid of me.

And would she cry?

She would probably cry because she has a sick soul.

Frankly, I didn't even want him to come to my grave.

The inner reckoning with oneself was painful.

After my conversation with him yesterday, I retreated to my room and sat there until the evening. In the evening he invited me for dinner. Even though I didn't want to go to him, I had to leave the room because I was hungry.

He tried to talk to me at dinner, but when he saw that I was unresponsive, he stopped talking to me. After dinner, I locked myself in my room and didn't come out until the morning. 

This morning, after having breakfast, I locked myself in the room full of books at home.

I think books were the written form of pain. It was a kind of poison that caused pain when read, but this poison was not drunk, it was read.

There were countless books in the library. I had read some of them, but most of them were foreign to me. It was not enough that most of the things in this house were foreign to me, but the books were foreign too.

Apart from these books, there was nothing to do in the house. It was a boring and depressing library. The books in the library, which was covered with brown and shades of brown, were old editions of dark-colored books.

The brown book graveyard in front of me was mostly classics, history and science books. I saw a few detective stories, poetry and other genres, but he obviously only read and liked history and classics.

I didn't like those kinds of books, I liked to read crime fiction in general.

I got up from my chair and walked to the bookshelf. I picked up one of the books at random and sat on the couch again. There was a medium-sized table and four chairs in the room. I think it was a comfortable place to read a book.

When I was a child, I used to pick up a book at random, open a random page and read the first sentence or paragraph I saw. It made me happy for no reason. Since I never liked reading books, I usually spent time with books in this way.

The book in my hand was called The Collector*. It was the first time I had heard of this book. I had no idea what it was about, but I had a feeling that it was a thriller.

I took my eyes off the book, opened a random page of the book and put my thumb on the bottom of the page. Then I turned back to the book and read the sentence I pointed to with my thumb.