Part time tales

the Feather

It feels strange feeling empty like this. a sadness so unwarranted and unsettling like I've never felt. Now that I think on it its like I've never once been sad and this is my first time, as if despair, distress, and depression are all separate from sadness, yet my whole life I have confused them all as the same thing.

Id like to say that I will feel like this again, not because I want to, but because it's a fine reminder that I am nothing more than a lost mind in a sea of pain, on the odd occasion I spot land but never get to tread its sands, and every now and then the harsh current will pull me under and suffocate me in its blackness. But this, this is something new, something I may have never felt aside from now.

When I sore it, I know what I knew, that it would be a mercy to end its life, but to kill something I have no malic for, no hate for it's not in my nature. I looked into its simple eye surrounded by feathers and thought it easier to kill a human than end this simple creatures life prematurely, and it would be! because its easy to hate our own kind for what they are capable of, or what they could do, or the threat they pose, but to kill something that will never in its existence ever harm me just in that moment seemed devoid of meaning.

It tried to fly, but like me it couldn't, it tried, and tried and tried because it knew what it was capable of, but it just never took to the sky, instead just waited... waited for the death I hope it never saw coming.

I wish I could say that its death gave me respect for life but I don't think it did, because I've always had confidence in the life of other things, just never within my kind, they always cause problems, cause hurt and neglect responsibility for the trouble they cause, but a flightless feather from the sky is... well it is what we should all aspire to be, not rich or poor, not happy or sad, not even dead or alive, just there, around and responsive, at peace with the simple decisions that we make with full confidence that they will never hurt another, not even after a hundred flaps on the other side of the world.

I wish I did not feel this way like I assume all do who feel like I do, but the world is full of bad things, and this happens all the time, just to me it has only just set in.

Its not that I've never experienced death, I suppose I have however minimal, but this was something different, a youth stripped of its youth and for nothing, a creature with no hate in the world in my hands... hands that have held in them my head in moments when all I could feel was hate, or anger, or stress, or pain, or depression or anxiety, but like I said, never sadness.

It's strange to think of emotion as something tangible, as it doesn't deserve to be. But when I feel anxious, I feel it in my chest, and my sadness rests in my stomach, my hate builds up my body and finds its ways into my hands and my mind and my stress cringes in my fingers and other things find there way around as if they belong, but so many things don't belong, and time to time I think that feeling doesn't belong, sometimes the point is lost on me.

I wonder if the little feather felt in its last moments, it's not something I want to think on but my mind in the moments since have lingered on those things as if they could redeem me in my own eye for the mercy I greatly regret. I wonder whether it felt fear of its coming end, I wonder if it was in destress at its broken wing, and every few seconds I blame myself for not caring for it in ways I had no inkling, if I had enlightened myself could I have brought this innocent creature back to the world, but regret doesn't fix the inevitability of the past, only manufactures lingering pain.

Time... some say that time heals all things, and I don't believe this, time gives you space to forget, become distracted because God knows you don't wish to remember, time is no great healer, just the world's biggest scam cloaked in the shadow of grief.

There comes a point where words are just words, I suppose. where what I'm saying no longer registers and is only vowels and consonants, the message lost to the ramblings of self-imposed loss and ethical dilemma, but to me these words will always be a symbol of something, of the moment I have yet to lose to time, of the life I had to take, of the way the innocence of this poor creature made me sad at its inevitable mercy.

I guess what I want is an excuse, maybe this is it, maybe these words are all that I need to feel better, because after all this is what it's all about, isn't it? It's all about me, staving of my own sadness with words because it's new to me, a way of excusing emotions I think unjust.

This shouldn't be about me, I'm the one left to feel this way, however I suppose this is the way of our kind, of human kind, to be the victim, to be selfish and conceded and use anything as a mirror to reflect their own corrupt image, and this is why it was hard to end the feather, not because it was youthful, but because it was undeserving of death, and If I could say the same for the people in the world I wouldn't be righting this, because then death and sadness would make sense, but if I cant be sad for the death of a human, then why the death of an injured bird?