Chatterbox: Down to Earth

Wildlife Cams!

basically, pictures of wildlife (or pets! Tsuki, I love how you love to bring your dog into everything, and of course Cupcake and Muffin are still the most adorable cutie kittens ever), or just nature in general, whether that be beautiful skies or plants growing in the sidewalk... kinda a regular photography thread Ig. So yup! 

Partly inspired by Peregrine Falcon, whom, thank you so so so so so so so much you don't know, you've helped me discover who I was before again and... the past few days have been beautiful, magic everywhere I looked. Just today, SO MANY of crows flew over my head! I mean, just a take a second to imagine this:

Look up into the sky. It's blue and clear and stretches to infinity. There's a slight breeze, cool on your cheek, but the sun still warms you. It's a perfect day. You're at school, classes ended hours ago and you're staying late, waiting to be picked up. You have a big book on your lap, a kit kat bar you've been saving for a special time in your hand, and you've just finished your first day of working on your novel, writing 2608 words, instead of your goal of 1667. You're kinda feeling sorta immensely proud of yourself maybe. Everything is quiet, except for the gentle chirping of birds all around you. The building you're sitting next to has ivy growing all over it so it slightly feels like you're in a fairytale. Perhaps you are. Everything is too good to be true.

You are alone. No people are around to burden you, to hassle you with well-meaning intentions or otherwise. There is absolutely no pressure at all to actually interact with people (my dad's exact words to me the first day of school: "make sure to actually interact with people, okay?") or be social in any sense. You're by yourself. You're free. You're happy.

You've just gotten to Part 2 of your book (The Priory of the Orange Tree, naturally), so you decide to take a break and enjoy the golden sunset and the scenery. Then you hear a noise like:

CAW! CAW! CAW!

(or something of the like, I can't exactly remember now) 

you look up and you gasp. Birds. Birds are filling the sky, surrounding you, spreading a velvet black curtain over the blue blue sky. Birds. What seems like millions of crows, wings outstretched, cawing and swooping and gliding free. They're elegant and majestic and so so wild, and in that moment, you want to be wild with them. You put down your book. You put down your kit kat bar. You slide off the bench you were sitting on.

No one's around to watch. No one's around to criticize. But even if they were, you know you would've acted the same way anyway.

You cry out and run, run with the birds, run as far as you can go to the edge of the property and you laugh and you twirl around and you hold your arms out and you stare up at the sky, the brilliant sky, the sky of birds, the whole time, and you are one of them too, in that moment, in that moment that stretches for forever.

They come in waves. Wave after never ending wave. Glossy ebony filling up the sky everywhere you look.

Let your mind go wild now. Let it exaggerate and blow up how many birds there were. There still wouldn't have been enough. Say I was too caught up in the moment, to exhilerated, to know truly how many birds there were.

But I wasn't. Because they came again. The whole flock of them - I won't say murder because it was so beautiful and elegant and "murder" calls up all the wrong images - passing overhead again and again, the numbers seeming to grow larger each time.

The last, I was making my way over to where my mom's car was parked, having finally arrived. I was skipping, skipping with abandon, skipping because even with the heavy backpack on my shoulders I felt light as the breeze, as the birds...

They came back as I was halfway there. And I looked. And I counted.

I counted sparingly. I counted precisely. I counted carefully. 

I counted 111 and more.

And I'd like to say that, here, I ran off to join the birds, free, untethered forever, caught in the thrill and joy of the moment...

I went to my mom. I went home.

But I went home changed.