• As the last snowfall of the winter melted, the once pristine white ground turned to a murky brown. Instead of washing away the embedded filth and decay, the rain and snowmelt brought it to the surface, creating a cesspool of infested and infected mud. A year ago this very day he had been trapped, no freer to leave on his own will than a lone sailor marooned on an island.

    But today was different. He was no longer the neurotic, compulsive, man he was a year ago. No longer did he allow the obsessive, intrusive thoughts to control the way he lived his life – completely, anyway. For the first time in 334 days, Tim Burr was going to walk on mud.

    Easier said than done, he decided at the bottom step of the porch. He fought with his own mind, obsession versus rationalization. The mud is everywhere and if I step in a puddle it will soak through my pants. So what if it does? It could touch my skin. It could be filled with bacteria that will enter my pores and make me sick. There probably isn’t anything lethal in there. But I can’t be sure.

    He stepped off the porch and into the mud. He held his breath. He began to sink.

    Certain that his feet and legs were being engulfed by the earth, he screamed and shut his eyes and grabbed the stair railing, but when he noticed he wasn’t being sucked into the dark abyss, he looked down at the ground. He could not see the bottoms of his boots, but when he lifted a leg, he saw an imprint only a centimeter deep.

    With a red-tinged face, he pried his hands from the wooden post and looked around in mild embarrassment until he remembered that he was in the middle of the woods and that nobody cared. This, perhaps, was the one thing Tim loved about nature: Even with his nonsensical thoughts and bizarre habits, he was no more different than the creatures around him. As he walked down the familiar trail, the trees did not sneer and the squirrels did not smirk. They did not define him or themselves or anything else in their world as weird or normal; there were no standards in which they had to conform to please one another. His presence was all the information they cared to know and everything else was superfluous. As far as they were concerned, what was natural was normal.

    The same could not be said for people. Nobody dances at dances and when they do it consists of reserved arm flailing that could nonchalantly be transformed into a back scratch in the event that anyone actually looked. Office parties provided a perfect time for socialization, yet none took place. Instead of striking up a discussion with an unfamiliar colleague, people huddled in their familiar cliques, superficial conversation being the goal. Otherwise, they stood at the walls of the room, in silence, terrified of accidentally doing anything that felt remotely natural to do.

    And animals didn’t care. Up ahead in the trail, a small, blue, happy bird splashed and tweeted and danced about in a puddle of rainwater that had formed in the crook of a decaying tree. And another bird, this one red, sipped the water of the first bird’s dance floor. And all was well for the two of them.