by Eliza Hayse

In the spring, I watch feathers float slowly to the ground, riding on wind currents. I envy them, the way they can stay suspended in air for longer than gravity would usually allow, the gossamer dawn light making them shimmer. I wonder what creature had to die for this soft sight, for the feathers coat the ground like a blanket, but there is no body, and no blood. Maybe it is inadvertent flaw in my mind, to be thinking of the grief that must be associated with this sort of beauty. I walk alone, as I usually do in the morning, and the city is quiet. My feet barely make a noise on the gravel, and in a way, I wish they did. If I make no noise, I can almost pretend I am not here at all, and that is a dangerous thought. I’ve been testing the limits of my body once more, enjoying the ache in my knees and the shake of my hands. I like the fact that I have become my own predator, filling my insatiable need to run from something by working to destroy myself. It becomes difficult to explain to others, the way I restrict myself not out of hate, but for pleasure. Somewhere along the way, it became my own secret game. How small can I become.

These thoughts always make me wonder if change makes everyone as uncomfortable as it makes me. Thawing out stings, and realizing that time is passing adds salt to the wound. In the winter, one can collapse into themselves and like the earth beneath the frost, grow hard. When something resembling sunshine first breaks through, people flock outside, driven by some internal longing. Bleary eyed and pale, it is startling to see so many faces, smiling and sighing and talking to one other. In another life, perhaps, I am one of them, able to participate in the world around me without sensing that in some way, I am just watching it all from above. An old lover once told me that I liked to make myself feel like I didn’t belong, that I liked to make everything complicated. I’d laughed at his assumption, and wondered how he didn’t see that everything is, how could he not see what I am and what I am not? I miss him sometimes, the way his eyes focused on whatever was in front of him, his hands always steady. But that was a long time ago, and I guess at some point, I’d realized I didn’t really want to be loved. I wanted to become the fetid rot that fills your nose and lingers, the film that sticks on the back of your teeth after eating something too sweet. Something semi-permanent. 

I suppose it is not just spring that makes me burn. Last fall, I heard the trees sigh as they prepared for winter. October has always reminded me of the number seven, so the whole month I counted to seven over and over again in my head. I think autumn makes me revert to my youth, when I was naive enough to think that I could find safety from the world in numbers. This year, like all the others, counting didn’t help. A tree fell in the park one windy Thursday night, and the grief from it all stained my pillowcase with tears. I don’t like to think about fragility, in fear thinking about it will make my bones turn to stone and I will have to watch everything fall around me. I’ve learned that the start of every season makes me nauseous, the rocking motion of change making me seasick and dizzy. Sometimes I think this means something is fundamentally wrong with me, when I can hear everything shifting and feel it crawling up my spine, reminding me that nothing will ever be as it is now. 

Soon, the puddles that I watch the crows drink from will dry up permanently with the summer sun. They will croak and move to the fountain, or the pond. I wonder if they’ll miss the muck, the taste of cloudy water. I would not be surprised by their persistence of memory. Researchers have tested their intelligence for decades, and found that they recognize faces and use tools, communicate with calls far more complex than our ears detect. I think about this as I watch them drink. I walk by this puddle every day, and wonder if they recognize my face, the pattern of my footsteps. This winter, I opened my backpack and tossed them seeds, seeds I could not bring myself to eat. Ever since, they watch me, heads cocked, and now, when I walk by, they do not fly off. Have they come to expect me, come to know me? In some other life, perhaps, I am a crow queen, covered in black feathers, my intelligence less of a hindrance and more of a faculty. I would call to my murder, and we would drink mucky water together, break nuts open with our beaks and eat to our fill. If we were still hungry, we could find the girl pacing through the park, throwing her seeds to the birds, and peck out her eyes. We could give her that peace. 

I wonder if it makes me naive to think that I am alone in thinking about the world like this. I spend my days studying how plants as small as my thumb communicate with chemicals, sending signals that tell them danger or there is good soil here. There is no centralized consciousness, therefore it is a connected one, consciousness in every cell. I envy them, never being trapped in the labyrinth of something as malleable as a mind. When deprived of water, most plants will experience such a change in pressure that they emit a high frequency sound, like a scream that only they can hear. When I learned that, I imagined myself shrinking down to the size of a water molecule and screaming, wondering if then, anyone would hear. I suppose this answers the age-old question. If a tree falls in a forest, it will always make a sound, just perhaps one we are not meant to hear. 

There is something cruel about a consciousness that notices not only its own suffering, but all others too. We are trapped in such soft bodies, our hard skulls that can be filled with violent images that feel like assault; a tree that falls in a forest, a bird that is torn apart by another, a child’s traumatized stare. Humans like to think we are the peak of evolution, but isn’t it primal to have to carry suffering alone in our heads? Here, I am an example of archaic beliefs that we hold, in believing my own loneliness is unique. If we were trees, we would feel each other’s suffering in our roots, letting it become part of our bark and leaves, and perhaps our screaming would cease. 

Someday on a cool spring Sunday afternoon, I will collect all of the feathers I find and weave myself a dress so soft I will barely feel it brush my skin. By this point, I will be as lithe as a willow, my muscles will move beneath my skin like minnows. I will grind flour from my own suffering, add in the fat that I have melted away from myself, collect orphaned eggs from the crows I call my own. I will bake a cake and dust it with the finest sugar. I will sit on the kitchen counter, like some sort of huntress, and eat and eat and eat. I will use my hands, feeling the weight of the indulgence collect under my fingernails, sticking to the palm of my hands. Sugar can collect on my fingers, my nose, at the back of my throat. I will fill a glass with murky water, and let it dribble down my chin as I quench my thirst. I will sit there, in my own feathery, sugary, filth, and be so beautiful that I finally believe it. So beautiful, I will no longer need to hunt or be hunted. And perhaps then, only then, some of the versions of myself that I lock away will come out and eat with me. Perhaps then, I will know what it is like to not be alone.