Stuff For School
Only half-written, but I can use it for momentum for any final half-yearlies.
I can't believe I'm going to be graduating so soon, I feel like my life is going nowhere in a misdirected circle. I keep thinking about how I'll die and how I never really lived, but I'm too complacent to do anything about it. Death scares me, because even though I try so hard to have faith, all I see is blankness.
---
Second Nature
The youngest pigeon takes proper flight thirty days after hatching. The sky is vast and daunting, but the baby pigeon pilots through the air with automated ease. Wings slice through white vapour as he glides across the stratosphere like a puck on ice.
Hoots of encouragement sound from below, where the mother pigeon spreads her wings to accompany her spawn in navigating the blue. Her initial flapping is ungraceful and lumbering, but she finds a balance, recognises a familiar rhythm, and soars upwards. She flies higher and higher until the chirping of her offspring below are but a whisper in the firmament. The sun’s rays permeate faintly through the shimmering clouds, highlighting the dishevelled feathers tousling in the breeze.
One by one the squabs hurdle from the nest, plummeting a metre or so before the lift under their wings raise them towards the empyrean. The kit of pigeons danced across the azure like dust particles in the afternoon sun. None took notice of the eldest hatchling who perched at the edge of the nest. Desperately flapping her wings. Yearning for the blue yonder.
---
She was the first one to break through her egg. It was a slow and tedious process, writhing inside the miniscule space, pushing up against the white shell, being naïve of her needs but knowing her wants. Her want to escape. Eventually her raw, scarcely feathered head was met with supernal bright light, and the slight sheen of grey feathers obscured her vision. She was unsure of what she was and what to do. But her instincts told her she was safe.
Her early days were spent chasing instinctively after the mother hen, quivering, squeaking, and demanding to be fed. During the odd times in which she wasn’t being tended to, she hid comfortably between the crudely built wall of the nest and the hard-shelled eggs that housed her soon-to-be siblings.
Within a week her feathers became more defined, her beak narrowed, and her vision sharpened. Within two weeks she grew slightly bigger, and her feathers coloured into the familiar hue of grey. Within three weeks she began to chirp and communicate things beyond her obnoxious squeaking. Within all three of these weeks her two siblings were born. Red, bloodshot, and fragile.
She noticed something amiss in the fifth week, a while after her companions were hatched. She watched her siblings grow, she watched their feathers become defined, their beaks narrow. She watched them become slightly bigger. In particular she watched the feathers on their wings. Smooth, stiff, asymmetrical, but symmetrically paired. She observed them flap their wings, fluttering centimetres above the nest before falling depressingly back onto the stick cushion.
She dismally flapped her own wings. Her remiges were scattered, disorderly, soft and in disarray. She flapped harder. But she wouldn’t lift.
--
maybe I'll finish it when I have to.
I can't believe I'm going to be graduating so soon, I feel like my life is going nowhere in a misdirected circle. I keep thinking about how I'll die and how I never really lived, but I'm too complacent to do anything about it. Death scares me, because even though I try so hard to have faith, all I see is blankness.
---
Second Nature
The youngest pigeon takes proper flight thirty days after hatching. The sky is vast and daunting, but the baby pigeon pilots through the air with automated ease. Wings slice through white vapour as he glides across the stratosphere like a puck on ice.
Hoots of encouragement sound from below, where the mother pigeon spreads her wings to accompany her spawn in navigating the blue. Her initial flapping is ungraceful and lumbering, but she finds a balance, recognises a familiar rhythm, and soars upwards. She flies higher and higher until the chirping of her offspring below are but a whisper in the firmament. The sun’s rays permeate faintly through the shimmering clouds, highlighting the dishevelled feathers tousling in the breeze.
One by one the squabs hurdle from the nest, plummeting a metre or so before the lift under their wings raise them towards the empyrean. The kit of pigeons danced across the azure like dust particles in the afternoon sun. None took notice of the eldest hatchling who perched at the edge of the nest. Desperately flapping her wings. Yearning for the blue yonder.
---
She was the first one to break through her egg. It was a slow and tedious process, writhing inside the miniscule space, pushing up against the white shell, being naïve of her needs but knowing her wants. Her want to escape. Eventually her raw, scarcely feathered head was met with supernal bright light, and the slight sheen of grey feathers obscured her vision. She was unsure of what she was and what to do. But her instincts told her she was safe.
Her early days were spent chasing instinctively after the mother hen, quivering, squeaking, and demanding to be fed. During the odd times in which she wasn’t being tended to, she hid comfortably between the crudely built wall of the nest and the hard-shelled eggs that housed her soon-to-be siblings.
Within a week her feathers became more defined, her beak narrowed, and her vision sharpened. Within two weeks she grew slightly bigger, and her feathers coloured into the familiar hue of grey. Within three weeks she began to chirp and communicate things beyond her obnoxious squeaking. Within all three of these weeks her two siblings were born. Red, bloodshot, and fragile.
She noticed something amiss in the fifth week, a while after her companions were hatched. She watched her siblings grow, she watched their feathers become defined, their beaks narrow. She watched them become slightly bigger. In particular she watched the feathers on their wings. Smooth, stiff, asymmetrical, but symmetrically paired. She observed them flap their wings, fluttering centimetres above the nest before falling depressingly back onto the stick cushion.
She dismally flapped her own wings. Her remiges were scattered, disorderly, soft and in disarray. She flapped harder. But she wouldn’t lift.
--
maybe I'll finish it when I have to.