Sometimes, it just kinda happened.
My loneliness. The fact that I had nobody.
It just… sorta happened.
I think that for the first week I was in Stardew Valley, my mind was majorly taken over by the thoughts of moving, and what I was to do here.
Well, now that I was making a decent living again, and had figured out how to farm and everything, my mind could finally get back to what was important. My crippling lack of social support.
The daydreams. The mental images of having someone to hang out with at any moment, someone to hold… someone thinking about me on a regular basis… It ran through my mind more often than I could track. It just happened. Hard as I tried, there was no controlling it. It was almost like I'd trained this mindset into myself somehow.
Some days, it made me feel shittier than others.
I could go about my day alright, but it was always with weight in my heart, and the occasional tear in my eye.
...Usually, the first thing I did when I woke up in the morning was to check up on Laslow. I think I was afraid he'd get sick with something completely preventable, then drop dead. It took a few days of seeing his jovial self walk about the place for it to register that I was doing okay as a cat owner.
Oh, those crops I planted did eventually grow. I picked them and planted some more, but I gotta tell you, I was a proud farmer. I was made especially happy to see those blue jazzes; those things were beautiful. In fact, I basically just planted more of them. Maybe I'd be one of those flower-selling girls from times of y'old. Sounded like an adventurous life to me. Then again, times had changed. I'd probably have to get a degree in flowers and open a freakin' shop in this day and age.
I went into town that day, intending to buy a fuckton of blue jazz seeds… but got another idea for a fun thing to do. I could plant some produce and cook some fun food with it once it grew! Maybe I could sell that and become known as Stardew Valley's head chef! Or… you know… just make a few extra G.
So I brought a whole variety of different seeds to the counter at the general store that day, went home, and started planting them.
After I planted the first pack, I decided to stop for a moment. I stayed completely still, so my heart and lungs were the only things moving.
I took in the sounds of my new home. Well, what few there were. All I could really hear were birds, and even their chirps were real faint. Things were just way too quiet.
And I still had all these seeds to plant.
So I started to hum. It was a song that I'd quite honestly had stuck in my head the past two days, a love song about how lost someone was before he met the love of his life.
Of course I daydreamt of my ever having this sort of importance to someone. Well, would I really want anyone I cared about to feel the pain of being completely lost? Yes, I decided. Being lost is painful, but the pain is completely worth it if you glean a lesson from it. You could get a doctorate in anything, but you'll still end up losing a good half, if not three-quarters, of what you were taught. These lessons, though… the lessons you learned from pain, uncertainty, and mistakes... were the ones that would stick with you for the rest of your life. I'd certainly learned a good chunk in my first 20 years here in this universe, and I had never been so enthusiastic about learning. As much as loving to learn would have been a great asset in school, I just couldn't do it. Learning from life itself, though, made me extremely happy. I could have been an honors student in the school of life. Maybe not the valedictorian, but certainly an honors student. Of course I would want someone I cared about to experience that.
Laslow meowed. I quit humming when my heart lurched from the startle. I looked around in my kneeling position, then stood up to look behind me.
He was very much eyeing a bush in the distance.
"Laslow?" I asked. "You, uh…okay, buddy?"
He just kept staring at it.
So I went over and did a survey of said bush. I even tried looking within it. Nothing. Cats see ghosts all the time, I figured, so that must have been it.