I remember seeing that out in the window, snow began falling through the sky. It was in the middle of November when I checked the calendar. I quickly go outside, without any preparation to wrap myself in an appropriate clothing, just a casual, indoor shirt and jersey, and a grinning face, ready to get that feeling of excitement of touching a falling snowflake with your bare hands. The next thing that happened is, you would probably guess, that I got sick on the last day of November. Though it is a mild flu, the doctor said that it was just my body trying to adapt, and I should take care of it with how you would treat a normal cold.

  It's my first winter in another country.

  I imagined touching snow as a task on my "To Do List Before I Died," and now I have marked one more number.

  Never thought that I would go this far throughout my journey. I even remembered that day that I boasted to my friends about going to college in another country. At those times I didn't even get the first notification of acceptance in their scholarship programs, yet I still said that I would go there. My friends said that I was just searching for attention, and started on joking about getting slaved. Why another country, where we have everything here? You'll just get slaved with their evil schemes. Who knows? They laugh, and then I laugh with them, of course, don't want to hurt their feelings. Besides, it was me who started being too egocentric like that. No one would like that kind of person, right? But interviews after interviews I have taken that took me months. I've even taken Proficiency Language Test for addon of positive reviews in my CV. Then, finally, I reached the last notification saying that I was being awaited on arrival at their international airport, and also my placement in the named university, majoring in LBB for 4 years. I replied with much gratitude and was informed by their informant that I've only got 2 weeks of preparation.

  It is another dream come true.

  For the first third months, I've been living in the city where I took college as smartly as possible. Being alive with minimum cash—because I still do not have any part-time job to find. Living with the subsidies that my parents generously gave to me, and a yearly dividend from my stupid, yet somehow positive investments, many of which I've put into mining and transportation industries. I start to like playing stocks after my 18th birthday—because of the influence of watching so many investments for beginner videos on YouTube.

  To say, I am proud of what I could do. Living with a primary goal of finishing college while having a part-time job, and then finding a permanent, good-income job there, where I would then go back to my home country 3-4 years after establishing myself in a successful position.

  But first, I would need to navigate on what to buy during the first day of December. This month I would turn 20, finishing half my semester, and getting so many discounts on a grocery that surely, I could use to save more money. Hoping, after that saving-spree I could pay some of the loan I have taken for the language tutoring fee that I haven't paid.

  I regret not being serious about learning to speak properly, which I have struggled with even after months of living there. It even made me dumber because I didn't speak my language again for months, and when my parents or my friends call me and we talk, I kind of forget some words and sometimes bite my tongue while I talk. Mixing both of the languages—surely it has to do with adapting--It somehow gives me a passive mark that tells that 'I'm a foreigner' type of thing.

  Sadly, just one day before my birthday, I have to die, or so I believe. As I remember, I believe it was because of an accident where a cap-wearing shrouded-face-looking man suddenly pushed me to fall from the top of the city bridge into the river beneath.

  It was happening all of a sudden, and when I could react after that was just too late.

  Why do I die?

  That thought sounds meaningless now. I'm thinking more about how can I 'think' when my body is dead right now. Am I truly dead?

  Does that mean, that when one's body dies, the mind wouldn't follow? Or my mind is just in a super slowed state where it is trying its best to not disappear altogether? Whether you would call it a relief or not, I don't know. Also, don't ask me about why that man pushed me over to my death—I only know the last part that I have given, about the motives, only speculates, but in the end, I couldn't have known even when the police or some detective finds out whether it was an accident or not, but if it is not an accident, why though, I need to die?

  Am I that important for someone to hire an assassin to eliminate me because I bear a dark secret or does an international mafia organization want me to be killed because the very existence of me hinders their plans of inheritance intrigues? Or somewhat he was just a drunk man or a thief who wanted to steal my stuff but accidentally pushed me over? I wouldn't have known better. But he looks quite drunk, or did I smell it before I fell? I cannot tell.

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  So… this is what it feels like to be… dead?

  What a boring state it is. The absence of a body. The fading emotion of how it would feel if I still had a body. Hopelessly, I feel that this post-mortem state is the beginning of torture in hell. But I guess this is what Nietzsche would want after his death. Certainly, this could be better. I cannot wait longer than this. To say, I am feeling that it happened just yesterday, yet also over an eternity.

  After all, I am someone who believes in hell and the heavens.

  But who wouldn't have guessed? Could it be that the afterlife is just 'another life'? Hell, and heaven is just a replacement of department on where you would live? It is possible.

  Boy, how isolation can make one's mind go wild. Is this how it feels to be a grizzly bear during its hibernation? Is the bear just sleeping past through it and then waking up like it was just sleeping one or two hours? Or is he dreaming of creating a family and then after seeing the light of the stars suddenly turn weird, he realized that it wasn't normal at all, and he was just living in a long dream after all? Speaking of starry nights, why don't I remember all my past life? Instead, just that one moment of me staring into the window, seeing the first snow falling through the sky?

  Snow

  I see snow. Slowly drifting downward. Landing on the ground softly. Creating a white landscape reminiscent of what I remembered that day. A grey sky now filled the frames of a small window without giving any clear sunlight—it is daytime and it is bright nonetheless. I can feel it—and not far, I see a forest, boreal type, common across the North-Eastern part of Europe. The trees are gigantic, to say. Archaic and almost impossibly big for this era. A forest that would only exist as a fantasy or a story from a bygone age.

  Suddenly, for a second, I feel de ja vu. Instantly, I feel heavy. My body and mind are pulled from a state of floating free to heavy-weight going down because of gravity.

  I can sense of regaining something. At first, it was both of my arms, then my legs. Slowly regaining the sensation of breathing—I breathe like a mad bull. Or accurately, like someone who'd drowned just recently. I regained my body. My body!

  Am I not dead?

  Somewhat, I thought this was a legit thing. But, after I regained my composure, I felt something was off here.

  Right now, I'm sleeping—awake in a sleeping position—and sightseeing the windows again, only to find the same landscape, and then I see the ceiling--I cannot see any lamps or cable of electricity being planted, which is weird somehow, and the wall beside me was all made of wood.

  A hospital wouldn't look like this. Even a cabin in the middle of the woods can be better than this unless it is in the deepest of woods where civilization is absent. But I'm in the middle of the city just before! This is too small, shabby, and abandoned to be called a house or a log. Many cobwebs and the lack of furniture elaborate more about the nuance of something that was off. Not just this place, but the fact that I am here also.

  I get up to my feet, starting to get up by sitting straight, but my feet aren't even touching the floor when I sit at the end of the bed.

  "Huh?"—It is strange. Impossible for me to suddenly shrink, right? I know my own height.

  I see my feet just to make sure. It is covered with orange and black fur, with an inch of white fur just between my legs, and now it's shaped like a curved 'S' letter, and it is now small and thinning as it goes down until it reaches my now elongated plantar feet.

  "Ah…What…!?"

  As I tried to murmur a question to myself, I was also taken aback greatly because of the sound I made and realized that my mouth felt so dry right now.

  "What the fuck…" I spoke, again, hearing the sound change to that of a growl into a high-pitched squeak. Then I check my body. Never have been surprised by that more.

  "Oh shit," that is the word that I could only whisper. Brownish-red fur now dominates my uncovered body—I am naked, though the fur somewhat gives me some feeling of coverage, but it is very uncomfortable even for me to see—black fur is at both ends of my limbs, my hand now puffed like a cat's paw. A sharp claw at every point of my fingers now shows up like a small curved screw knife. The white fur starts from top to bottom, going through my belly and into the thigh, disappearing altogether after the groin. The rest is that brownish-red fur.

  It is all fur altogether.

  It does not end there, as I felt a thing suddenly poking through my butt, which is a tail of bushy things that appears very alive—even though I don't command it. It seems out of my control as it wags nervously to and from left and right, and my face—when I touch it throughout, it has become elongated to the point of nothing funny as you would do it with a filter in your phone. The nose is a black point that I can see when I squint my eyes, and my mouth now looks ferocious with many carnassial-shaped teeth resembling that of canines. Somehow, I've also felt that some of my facial muscles become stiff.

  I writhe, trying to find something in that room, maybe a mirror? Trying not to feel agonized as I am now also feeling shocked and disgusted.

  It is helpless, then.

  "God…what I have become? Is this a joke? I've become…become…a fox?!" I said, trying not to scream.