seasons soon changing

In the little farm house I grew up in there was a free-standing wood stove in the kitchen, a hulking black thing with a squat maw of flame and embers. Once there was a rustling in the chimney pipe. This is when there wasn't a fire burning. The bird that came flapping out in a cloud of ash and soot seemed huge when confined to the room, it was a starling or a lark. When it stunned itself bashing against the windows we cradled it in a towel and took it outside where it sat for a moment then seemed to disappear, there and then gone, leaving a smudge of black.

I remembered this when thinking of how to describe how I've been feeling for the past few months, like wandering in a china shop where the fellow patrons kept insisting I was a bull. Unnatural. Ill-suited; troublesome. Then there was the sensation of looking in the mirror and seeing the horns and the ring in my nose, and walking out the door of the fucking china shop.

This is all to try and say: I am letting go and I am feeling good. I am feeling like the icy trickle of meltwater at the peaks of the mountains, and that this coy and nourishing new ecstasy will only build within me.