Peace
However, after contemplating existence, he decided to make peace with his new self. He may have thought it was curse at first, some perverse twist of fate concocted by the devil himself, but since nobody was making a big deal out of it, he figured he may as well just try to make the best of an extremely awkward circumstance.
He stood up and walked straight to his backpack. After empting it on the bed, he frantically snooped through all his belongings. Everything seemed to be in order, his notebooks, his pens, his books and his notes. Even the hand drawn cartoons he made when he was too bored in class were just where he left them. However, the one eerily different thing was that every instance where his name was written had suddenly changed to "Danielle". It was his very own handwriting, and he was absolutely sure nobody had tempered with his stuff. He tried his luck on the computer just to find the exact same problem. All his social media, all his digital assignments, even the nicknames for the games he played had morphed accordingly. He tried one last place, the photographic archive of his teenage years spread across several digital networking platforms. He expected to find his old self, maybe a couple of pictures from when he just started high school, a couple of pictures of him being a boy... a human boy.
He found them, but just as his name had changed, his body did too. Every picture and video showed a small tigress where he should have been. He even remembered the clothes he was wearing, some of them were dresses or otherwise girly clothing. It was bizarre, he was sure he never wore those things as Daniel, but the memory of Danielle, or more specifically, the memory of being Danielle had started to surface in his confused teenage mind. For a second, he himself felt as if that new body had been his all along. Still, the image of Daniel stood strong among those strange flashbacks of the female cat.
However, a lot of questions remained unanswered. Was he the only one? Why weren´t there any other anthropomorphic animals in the pictures? Why was the entire world disregarding his condition without saying anything about it?
He turned off his computer and fell on his bed like a log. He almost passed out, waking up the next morning with nothing but even stronger doubts pestering his head. His situation refused any form of logic, and yet there he was: a tigress walking among humans, a boy in a body that wasn´t his. Daniel tried to rationalize the situation, find whatever silver lining he could find to cope with the disappearance Daniel. Yet, what worried him the most was that maybe those new memories, the ones that appeared to be surfacing faster as time went by, would end up replacing everything. He feared that in a couple of days, there wouldn´t be any Daniel left... just Danielle, just the tigress.
He allowed himself to be tormented by that thought for a couple of minutes, only to realize that perhaps it was for the best. Perhaps he didn´t need to make sense of anything, but rather learn to forget and move on. Perhaps that gross simplification of life would make him happy.
Then came another knock on the door, ending Daniel´s emotional rollercoaster of existential angst. He quickly hopped to his feet and got to the door in a, suitably enough, catlike manner. He opened it up just to find Jake on the other side.
"Hey Danielle, what´s up?" Said Jake as he made his way into the room without waiting for an invitation.
Written by crimsonstar on 26 February 2016
