Cosy, and comforting. As warm as you feel on a fluffy sheepskin in front of a crackling fireplace, when a scent of winter is in the air and mixing with a cinnamon odor that is wafting in from the kitchen. Everything out there is just forgotten about, while you are here, in the one place that makes you feel safe.
Someone once told me that this is what home felt like, but I ccannot remember whether or not it is true. Because the walls of the only home I have ever known crumbled with the death of my mother.
My father tried to make up for her absence as much as he could. He used to work as a craftsman, but gave it up when he was 25 years old, so he could look after Mom. The romantic relationship between them grew from a close friendship, so my fahter told me when I was a child.
I'm not quite sure if they were ever really in love. However, I'd like to think they were, if only for a little while.
Her family owned land, where they kept horses, cattle and sheep. Their forests and fields were bordering the mountains where I was born. Neither did I ever meet my granddad, nor did I ever encounter my grandma. From the pictures that my father showed me, she was pretty. Her face, a perfect heart-shape and the eyes, greener than the mountain meadows she owned. She died of cancer briefly after my mother was born, which turned my grandfather bitter.
He wasn't ever good to my mother. Her face, just as heart-shaped, reminded him of the wife he had once loved and lost. Eventually, he followed her to the other side. Back then my mother was barely 25, so Dad has told me, and that she must have relieved by his passing.
He left her a lot. More than 700 acres of land. Speciose mountain meadows that would blossom in every colour of the rainbow every spring, and healthy forests that were curated by the clean air in the bordering mountains. After my grandfather's death, my father moved up to her, so he could help her looking after the land. He had known my mother since his early childhood, when his own father, a forester, would take him to the woods with him day after day.
Up there, in steep terrain, the forest provides protection against avalanches and mudslides. Where it over-ages, however, the land can no longer withstand the forces of nature, and damage occurs. In the mountains to prevent it, my father learned early on that everything needs to be balanced if life is meant to go on. When I was finally old enough, he passed his knowledge on to me.
He would show me lakes, on the surface of which the fish were drifting belly-up, and when I would approach the water, he would grab my sleeve to hold me back and warn me of the aggressive microorganisms in the algae that I would have on my hands. He would take me into wastelands of infertile fields, on which rabbits had become a plague, and he would point out how dilapidated the tree trunks looked in woods that were known for an overpopulation of bugs.
After my mother's death, he tried to teach me everything he knew. Unfortunately, he had only little time. For what they called neglect, they took me away from him, before I was of age. And there I was: an inexperienced boy, raised in the heart of the wilderness and with wilderness in his heart, to whom the supposedly real world he was dragged into didn't feel real, at all. You could barely smell it, barely feel it, and barely taste it, because it was far too full. Cramped with people, who would distract from everything that mattered. There was not only too many of them. With them, came far too many lies, pretenses, rules, and commandments .
Almost all of it was alienating for me. Alien were the people. Alien, the traffic. Alien, the asphalt that suffocated the last remnants of nature. I had first been introduced to the world down there through pictures and video-clips, before I had to live in it I and came to realise that nobody wass really living in it. No matter how long I would be forced to stay here, I wasn´t going to settle in. In my heart, a constant yearning, I wanted to go back to the piece of the old world that had been forgotten somewhere above the towns.
My father went to jail. Not because he had kept me hidden. They locked him up, because he struggled with his hands and feet, beat them up, and accidentally almost killed them, when they tried to take me from him. For half my life they have been trying to prove to me that something about him wasn't right, but the diary he left me with convinced me of the opposite. Unfortunately, by the time I read it, it was far too late to reactivate my lost relationship with him. He was dead by then. Like my mother, through his own hand.
How I wish I had grasped early on that he had seen all the things coming that were, in fact, to come. He had tried to keep me safe, before the resurrections began. Safe, that was, hidden, so I wouldn't have to play by anyone's rules, but my own. If he had still been alive at the time, I might have gotten away when immortality came for us. I never wanted it. I have never asked for it, but like everyone else I received it either way.
When we first realised that death wasn´t relevant to us any longer, most people did not complain about it. They spoke of miraclee and queued up in seemingly endless lines for a seemingly endless life, without giving a thought to what it would mean.
There are many things that you don't miss until they're gone, summer heat and winter's cold, for one. About the same it is with death. When it was still imperative to us, we were just as unprepared for it, as you would be for sudden snowfall, or fulminating heat. Seized by it, we suffered and wished for it to leave us be, but as soon as our wish was granted, we started longing for it back.
It was a never-ending vicious circle. Literally, the one we got caught in when we became immortal would, just like our lives, in fact, never reach an end.
Before I was of age, I became infected with immortality. When I was still a minor, all I was looking for was a home. I wanted to belong, but my adoptive parents treated me like dirt. They had me work like a dog for half the day, and all day long on the weekends. Whenever I disagreed with them, my adoptive father would beat me with the same broom that I had to use to do the sweeping during the day. Despite it, I never complained.
I was enough of a realist to realise that things could have been worse. To be fair, my adoptive family had its hardships as well, and I nearly understand how they ended up behaving the way they behaved. They had their reasons, but that didn´t make it right, either. They were at fault for the fact that immortality ever got a hold of me, and I would lie if I said that I don´t bear them an eternal grudge for it.
I reckon that I wasn't the only one who got infected with immortality, while they were looking for acceptance, for a home. For Michael, the closest confidant that I have ever had, it was quite similar. He was around 30 when he first became immortal. Deep inside, however, he has always been innocent. He has always only been a child, without a single bad bone in his body. Everything that he ever wanted was to make things right.
He was the youngest of a bigger family. His working class parents would fight all day, and his three siblings were misfits, who would only ever cause trouble for them. Of everyone in the group that I was to gather around me, I knew Michael the longest. I knew him before things deteriorated, knew him before anyone had ever been resurrected, and if I hadn't known him then, I might have gotten lost along the way.
He used to work in a bakery around the corner from where I lived. One of the few that still existed at the time. At the same time, it was perhaps the only one in our region where you were still served by people, and not by machines. No one really worked any more. An unconditional basic income had been introduced. It was what we were living on, but they money that we got was by far not enough.
The ttroubling financial situation was the reason why no one ever really left the house. Not for work, not for fun, and not for food. We would order groceries via intercoms that were installed in every room, and most things no longer even had to be ordered. If we requested them often enough, our wish was being granted before we could express it.
Every preference, every habit we had, was stored in endless registers, and for every single person there was a personal one. Where there used to be shops, there were only apartment blocks. All of them, insulated, you almost suffocated inside your own house, without oxygen system.
I was still a minor, still handcuffed to the people who had adopted me, and trapped in their house all day. School wasn´t a place where you went, in 2034. They had closed school building down a few years propr and let them fall to ruins, like something useless that had been overtaken by time. Those in disadvantaged families, and there were many of them in a time of inflation and unemployment, had to toil at home. Like me. I did everything that had to be done in my adoptive family's house. Until the day that Michael changed things for me.
With a shiner, I bought bread for our dinner in his bakery, a place that deliciously smelled of a better time. Staring at my black eye, Michael came out from behind the counter. I knew that he couldn't really help my situation. It would have been naive, nothing but a dream, if I had believed that he could. Despite it, he would give me something that would help me help myself. Steadfast, completely unfounded optimism.
"Just give me a smile, would you? You'll be fine, we'll make sure of it!"
Saying it to me, he lost himself in reverie. I gave him the smile he had asked for, as if to pay the loaf of bread with it that I had bought. A few weeks later, I was given an actual reason to have a smile on my face. A family court declared me of age. Eventually, I was free. Before I found a place of my own, a shabby and dark basement room, I lived with Michael for a while. I might have even called his place a home, if the course of the future hadn´t torn me away.