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Dispatches Of Splinters Of My Mind Entry 26:

 I have spent most of my life believing I was broken.

It is a convenient explanation. Society prefers broken things because they suggest repair. Give the wound a name. Assign it a diagnosis. Build a treatment plan. Promise enough discipline, enough medication, enough optimism, and eventually the damaged thing will become acceptable again.

Normal.

What an extraordinary word for people terrified of mystery.

The old stories never spoke that way. The myths understood something we have spent centuries trying to disinfect. Transformation is rarely beautiful while it is happening. It does not arrive wrapped in enlightenment or accompanied by orchestral music. It arrives filthy, hungry, and half-formed. It tears feathers from flesh and asks bone to remember a language older than walking. It leaves the soul crouched somewhere between species, unable to return to what it once was and incapable of recognizing what it is becoming.

That is where they found me.

Or perhaps…

That is where I finally stopped pretending I hadn’t always lived.

The swamp swallowed every sound except my breathing. Cold mud pressed between my fingers and toes, thick as wet clay, smelling of rotted leaves, stagnant water, and the sweet fermentation of forgotten seasons. People think decay smells unpleasant. They have never stayed long enough to notice the strange warmth beneath it—the perfume of one life quietly surrendering itself so another can begin.

Mist drifted through the trees in slow ribbons, soft enough to resemble memory made visible. The trunks rose around me like the pillars of some forgotten cathedral whose congregation had long ago become roots and moss. Water gathered at the tips of bare branches before falling in slow, deliberate drops, each one striking the flooded earth with the patience of a clock older than civilization.

I did not know how long I had been kneeling there.

Minutes.

Years.

Entire lifetimes.

Time loses its discipline in places abandoned by certainty.

Rain soaked my hair until it clung heavily against my neck. My skin had grown so cold that the sensation circled back toward numbness, yet beneath the chill something feverish continued burning. My muscles trembled—not from fear, but from the effort of carrying a weight my body still refused to understand.

The wings folded across my back were enormous.

Black.

Not the polished obsidian of ravens flying beneath winter sunlight, but the dull charcoal left behind after a fire has consumed everything worth naming. Their feathers smelled faintly of smoke and wet earth. When I shifted, they whispered against one another with the brittle sound of ancient pages turning inside a forgotten library.

I reached backward with shaking hands.

The feathers were warm.

Warmer than my own skin.

Alive.

I tried to stand.

My legs obeyed.

The wings did not.

Not because they were injured.

Because they remembered a gravity my body had forgotten.

There are burdens the soul accepts centuries before the mind invents words to describe them.

That was when I heard footsteps.

Not approaching.

Circling.

Measured.

Patient.

Each step sank softly into the mud without disturbing the silence surrounding it. The forest itself seemed to lean inward. Branches creaked overhead, not in the wind, but with the slow intimacy of listeners drawing closer to hear an old confession.

Somewhere above the fog, a raven called.

Once.

Only once.

As though announcing my arrival to witnesses I could not see.

“You’ve stopped fighting it.”

The voice came from nowhere.

Everywhere.

Old enough to sound like stone weathered smooth by thousands of winters. Neither man nor woman. Neither gentle nor cruel. It carried the strange authority of something that had watched civilizations bloom and collapse without ever needing to interfere.

“I never started,” I whispered.

The words tasted like wet iron.

A low laugh rolled through the trees, vibrating beneath the water more than through the air.

“No,” the voice answered. “You merely called it suffering.”

The sentence entered me like cold water beneath the skin.

Because it was true.

Every restless night.

Every dream where I woke tasting ash and feathers.

Every instinct that made me feel slightly displaced inside my own humanity.

Every room where I sensed I had been expected centuries before I arrived.

I had called all of it damage.

Never inheritance.

Never initiation.

Never destiny.

The black water pooled beneath my feet reflected my outline.

Except…

It wasn’t mine.

The creature staring back possessed a curved beak where my mouth should have been. Eyes darker than moonless rivers. Wings so vast they disappeared beyond the edges of the water itself.

Its feathers moved with the current.

Mine remained still.

Slowly, I lifted my hand toward my face.

The reflection did not imitate me.

Instead, it tilted its head with something that resembled pity.

Or disappointment.

Perhaps they are the same emotion viewed from different centuries.

How many mirrors had I abandoned simply because they refused to flatter me?

The realization settled into my bones with the terrible certainty of winter entering an empty house.

Perhaps identity is not hidden from us.

Perhaps we simply spend our lives avoiding every reflection unwilling to negotiate with our preferred illusions.

The fog thickened until the trees became pale ghosts dissolving into white silence. Water dripped steadily from the feather tips, each drop creating circles that widened across the swamp before disappearing into older ripples. Watching them, I wondered if memory behaved the same way.

One grief expanding into another.

One fear inherited from people whose names had already dissolved into dust.

One silence passed carefully from generation to generation because no one had survived long enough to translate it.

People speak endlessly about inherited blood.

Very few speak of inherited silence.

Silence travels farther.

It needs no language.

The voice returned, quieter now, almost compassionate.

“They feared what could not be categorized.”

I closed my eyes.

“So they named it monster.”

The swamp remained motionless.

“And what did you name yourself?”

The answer escaped before thought could intercept it.

“Wrong.”

The word barely disturbed the air.

Yet the entire forest reacted.

The raven overhead fell silent.

The water ceased moving.

Even the rain hesitated before touching the earth.

There is a loneliness unlike any other in believing your existence is fundamentally mistaken. It stains every kindness with suspicion. Every friendship becomes temporary. Every love arrives carrying the expectation that eventually they will discover what you have secretly believed all along—that you are not difficult because of what happened to you.

You are difficult because of what you are.

That belief had become scripture.

Not written in books.

Written into posture.

Into breathing.

Into the way I apologized before speaking and thanked people for tolerating my existence.

I carried it for decades without realizing how heavy certainty can become.

The reflection lowered itself until its beak touched the surface of the water.

Ripples spread outward.

The face dissolved.

Then slowly…

Painfully…

The creature and I became indistinguishable.

Not man becoming bird.

Not bird becoming man.

Something older than both.

Something that remembered a time before names divided the living into acceptable and unacceptable forms.

The old myths were never warnings.

We turned them into warnings because transformation frightened us.

Perhaps Lycaon was never cursed.

Perhaps the wolf was simply the first honest mirror.

Perhaps the raven did not steal prophecy.

Perhaps prophecy has always belonged to those willing to survive the terrible solitude of seeing differently.

The wings across my back shifted.

Not violently.

Tenderly.

Like muscles awakening after centuries of sleep.

I understood then why they had always felt unbearably heavy.

They had never been meant to remain folded.

The swamp smelled different now.

Cleaner.

Not because decay had vanished.

Because I finally understood decay is simply another dialect spoken by renewal.

The dead trees surrounding me were not monuments to endings.

They were scaffolding.

The next forest was already growing beneath their roots.

I looked once more into the black water.

The reflection remained.

Not as judge.

Not as monster.

Not as god.

As witness.

Patient enough to wait until I exhausted every explanation that required me to remain ordinary.

Only then did it lower its head.

Not in submission.

In recognition.

As though welcoming home a creature that had wandered too long beneath borrowed names.

And for the first time in my life…

I stopped asking the gods to finish making me.

Perhaps they had never abandoned the work.

Perhaps every grief, every exile, every strange dream, every feather hidden beneath my skin had been another careful stroke of the chisel.

The masterpiece was never meant to resemble a man.

It was meant to resemble the truth.

And truth,

like every forgotten god,

arrives wearing the face

everyone else

mistakes

for a monster.