Hypersensitivosaurus was struggling with the heat.
Even inside his cave, that was usually cool throughout the year, its desert vibe had managed to penetrate today.
The heat created a suffocating layer that seemed to be inescapable.
As if someone was slowly strangling you with a huge pillow.
He looked at his alarm clock that told him it was NOW o'clock.
This usually helped him to start the day on a positive note - as it made him stop regretting the past or worrying about the future - but today was a different story.
It was just too freaking hot.
Luckily, the next day started out a little cooler, after a night with thunder, lightning and some rain.
Hypersensitivosaurus decided to go on a morning walk to make up for yesterday's lack of exercise.
A little later he was sitting on a rock, enjoying the morning breeze. The sun hadn't broken through the clouds yet.
He had brought his coloring book and water pastels but it seemed like he didn't have the focus. His thoughts kept distracting him and it felt impossible to empty his mind.
No matter how much he tried to be mindful, his mind stayed full. Was he perhaps trying too hard?
It didn't help either that the rock he was sitting on made it impossible to feel comfortable and - aside from that - he felt hungry.
The handful of half-ripe blackberries that he'd picked - and eaten - on his way to this place could hardly be called 'breakfast'.
Why was he torturing himself this much?
A raptor, a meat eating dino, trying to make do with a measly amount of fruit. What a joke!
What would his dad think of him?
I decided to add some fragments of the 50 thousand words that I wrote last November, in particular on Hypersensitivosaurus' father:
Oh how he wished he had known his dad better. He had been very young when his mom and dad separated. This was, if he needed to believe his mom, a common thing among raptors. Or, to put it differently, a common thing for raptor males to do – find a mate, procreate and move on. Nevertheless, he felt that his dad had been different. That he didn't want to do this, but that his lizard brain told him that he had no choice.
It was a good thing he didn't know all this. In his case, it was just his hypersensitivity telling him that he had some catching up to do with his dad. Although they hardly communicated during their time together, he felt they had always been very similar. Even if his father had been a hardcore meat eater. He felt that the latter couldn't really help this. It had just been the way he was raised, combined with an old fashioned stubbornness, possible fear of change.
And let me end today's post with another piece that I wrote last November:
A New Species
“You are not a raptor, so stop acting like one!” These five little words struck him like lightning and kept echoing through his head hours later, while out on a mindful run, trying to make sense of it all.
What had she meant with that?
He had always known that he was different but not in that way. Had his mom never been his biological mother? And what about his father? Wasn't his father a raptor? Wasn't he at least half a raptor? Then why had they grown up acting like velociraptors, always focused on speed and hunting? Had that just been their father's way of protecting them, as focused as he seemed to be on survival. Had they been plant eaters all along? No! He couldn't believe that.
When they met again, at his favorite spot ( where the fruit trees grew ), she looked at him with a look that he couldn't make any sense of. Hyper- or supersensitive or not, he had never been a star at guessing people's emotions. He decided it would be best to just be silent, until she started talking, so he started munching on some ripe fruit.
“I'm sorry...” she said. “I hope I didn't stress you out too much. It wasn't my intention to hurt you. Please let me explain the point that I was trying to make earlier...”
Hypersensitivosaurus is the main character in my upcoming children's book series ( also meant for adults ). I aim to release at least one of these books in 2020.
This extremely sensitive - and at times SuperZENsitive velociraptor - spawned from 50 thousand words that I wrote last November for NaNoWriMo ( National Novel Writing Month ). In this 'attempt at a novel', that might still become a novel one day, a guy is struggling to write a book titled 'The Story of Hypersensitivosaurus', a book that slowly but steadily takes over his life.
For those interested in this book, I recommend you to scroll back to my posts from November last year ( starting here ) or - prior to that - to the hatching of hypersensitivosaurus and the little video game that I made, that eventually inspired the book.
