Taking notes

Taking notes. That was always the case, by the very nature of his character. He needed it, the mere action eased his mind, made him feel better. The notes could be about anything - the time it took a slice of bread to toast, a weird obituary he'd casually seen in the papers, the hysterical laughter of a flock of teenage girls in the street, anything. The thoughts were clumsily annotated in dog-eared notebooks, drafting sentences which he later expanded slowly with the help of a dictionary, a process full of effort from which he derived enormous pleasure. The outcome usually filled him with pride, a feeling he kept to himself, turning his private achievements into one of his most personal activities. Pride going before no matter how insignificant a nonchalant opinion, that low was his threshold, a bitter pill to swallow, a foe he never dared to face, an obstacle not to be overcome a single time.