Stillflight

This isn't an entry on something I tried for the first time because I already know I love them. They're one of ultimate creature nostalgia foods. All I'm nostalgic for is 2021 but it's some of the best memories of taking my dad's car out to the Walmart or Heinen's every Thursday to buy a new type of fruit and get to be an animal about it. And yellow dragonfruit was always the best. Slicing it open and digging into the sweet grainy flesh made me feel so close to my rainforest opossum self. It's also kind of a ringtail food.

Anyway, that's all to say, I just had one, and it put me in an opossum shift. Specifically the paws and head shape. That large rounded head.

I fell into a brief but deep fantasy. As far as daydreams go, I could swear I was one intensity away from turning into an osprey right then and there, at which point I would go west. I would fly west for days until I reached the coast. Then I would perch on a bough of pine and stare at the Pacific ocean, knowing, I made it. I could never have made it as a human but a bird is free to go where he likes. I would open my wings, lift above the sea, look down, and see my target clear as day. Hover. Pinpoint. Close my wings and dip down.

Then... finally, then, I would dive. Finally, after everything, the one fantasy that has plagued me most would come true, and the cold shock of meeting the water would be my awakening. An awakening after a long, heavy sleep.

Ever since before I even knew what an osprey was I could feel the wind in my feathers as I stooped, the angle of my wings and tail, it has always been so clear in my mind how an osprey dives. How he snaps open his wings and plunges talons first into the cold water, feeling his claws sink into his target, and the exhilaration. Well, most ospreys wouldn't feel exhilarated. But me? After a life grounded, knowing for a strong fact it would never happen? It happening would be an explosion of wild freedom the likes of which a human could never know... which I will never know.

When I came to from this recurring fantasy today, I had an osprey's head. I could feel the way the feathers moved when I turned my head, my crest, beak, and the feathers going down my back and over my shoulders. And the eyes. It's hard to explain how it feels, and how I can tell that I have osprey eyes. It's not like my senses are biologically different suddenly. It just feels different. Things look different, not visually, but perceptually. I can feel the brow and the inhuman shape of my pupils.