ORIGINS: Don’t ask us why, maybe we could blame the hot-air balloons, but we saw birds when we looked at the first wolves in the original series. Those howling wolves could easily have shared their silhouettes with two pecking birds. There isn’t much of a difference between an ear and a beak, or between a snout and a crest, after all.
I am afraid. I want to be absolutely certain. Solid. To my core. But with each passing year I only add more rings, more doubts to this tree. When the bird is done pecking its hole, there is a possibility that I won’t have a soul. That it will only find darkness and empty words inside me. I always thought that birds were supposed to embody hope. But this feels like a kiss of death. Each deafening new crack lends its voice to my doubts. Validating them. And I wonder if this is how the sky feels after a storm. Emptier than ever before.
She told me that it would be like this. She blamed me, but I made a promise to myself. That I would never blame you. And I don’t intend to break it. Keep pecking, little bird. I will be your home. Take what is rightfully yours. Carve out a piece of my heart, and make your demands. You deserve the sky, you were born for it. I will be that person for you. I will embrace you and keep you safe until you are ready to fly. Without ever pointing at the cracks, at every hurt, at every loss and every grudge, letting you know just how much you owe me. Because I am not her, and I will never expect you to pay the price of the love I have for you.
Soon there will be a hole. I will bleed, maybe I will even cry. Red. A torrent of rage. A few tears here, a few words there. And then just a trickle of fear, before darkness becomes my whole world. If mercy was a real thing, red would wash all my monsters away and silence would wipe away my tears, letting me forget. But soon that bird will open its beak. It will sing. And my monsters will sing along. Because I was never alone in the world, and it was foolish of me to think that I could ever have grown to be anything other than a tree. Anything other than the same as everybody else.
Hurry up. Hurry up. Peck. Peck. Peck. I don’t have all day. I have too much to say. I need another mouth, if I want to fill the sky with my words. I tried writing them down, but my leaves kept falling to the ground and rotting away. And if they are doomed to disappear anyway, I would rather watch them float up out of this world. From my little bit of darkness to the immensity of space. Where dreams never get lost. Because, as you have told me, starlight isn’t breadcrumbs. And if my words will fade to black, no matter what, I would rather bury them with the stars than with a bunch of worms.
Is this it? I spent my whole life wishing I could break free from my cage. Wishing every root away, because even as a child I already knew that I wanted a future and not a past. But I have no words for this. Disappointment doesn’t even come close. And for the first time in my life I understand why wolves keep howling at the moon. I thought that I would be different. That once I reached the wild, I would no longer have a reason to close my eyes and howl. But the aftertaste in my mouth only gets stronger with each breath I take. And other than putting my hopes in an out-of-reach moon, I don’t know what else to do. Because I have already tried washing that disappointment down with my tears, and it didn’t work.
Is this what all the fuss was about? The bird kept pecking, trying to coax me out of this tree, back into the world. But I should have known better than to get my hopes up. Nothing has changed. The moon is still the same. It waxes. It wanes. I don’t have to open my eyes. I don’t even have to howl and wait for the echoes to come back to me. It doesn’t matter if there are new footprints on the moon, or if someone has filled in its craters to make it look like new. The roots haven’t changed. Sooner or later those fillings will fall out and new cavities will join the old ones. And if the bird knew me at all, he would have known that I was never fooled by moonlight. That the only reason I howled, louder than moonlight’s brightness, was to avoid believing anyone else’s lies, anyone else’s promises.
It was dark, but I liked it inside this tree. Every year the tree gave me a new ring, and I did my best to fill it in. I never managed to break the cycle. But I can proudly say that I never lost hope. Not for good. My moons waned, one and all, but I still managed to find enough light in me to bring the next ones to life. And that has to count for something. It has to. No one can blame me. Because no one blames the trees when they lose their leaves. They still manage to keep this world alive. Just look at all that air. They give you something to fill your lungs. And every time I howled, I gave you something to fill your heart. I did my part. And now it’s your turn. I wish you luck. Maybe no one will blame you, when you keep failing, and all you can do is save enough breath to try again.
I told this tree that I wouldn’t make a good moon. But the tree didn’t listen to a word I said. It had all these rings, and it refused to let them go to waste. So, the tree put me in a cage, and told me to howl. Until my wish came true. And I finally replaced the thing I worshipped, the thing I envied with all my breath. I told the tree that it wouldn’t work. That even if I somehow managed to fall in love with it and I spent the rest of my life orbiting it, I would still be a wolf at heart. I told the tree that it wasn’t out of my reach. That sooner or later I would break my leash and I would devour it. But the tree didn’t heed my warning. And I guess I have nothing to feel guilty about.
I was a wolf. But I must have howled at the moon one too many times, because someone put a curse on me and now I am a bird. The stars tell me that I was blessed. That this is the next step. But I don’t feel like singing. I open my beak and nothing comes out. The stars tell me that this is my chance to grow. To hone my skills, and unearth all my potential. My real self. But I was happy being a wolf, and just howling at the moon every once in a while. I never wanted to open my beak wide, until it resembled a waxing crescent and the full moon became my only ambition. My everything. The stars call it a blessing. But I know that being a bird can only be a curse. Because soon a song will drip from my beak, like drops of blood. And I won’t even watch my wings rot to nothing on the ground, because I can already tell that I will only have eyes for the moon.
That full moon should have been my cue. But I am not a wolf anymore. I am a bird, and singing for someone else is beneath me. I may not have a place among the stars, but black was never my color anyway. I prefer blue skies. It’s the same emptiness, but at least I can hear myself think when I fly in that color. Blue doesn’t make me feel like prey. Unlike the ravenous darkness of space. All that silence that would have no qualms about picking my bones clean, robbing me of every word and any hope of ever regaining my will to live. No. The moon can keep her hungry wolves and her ruthless raven. And I will keep to the sky. To the color that leaves my words where they belong, and lets me find my way back to hope.
Excuse me, but I wasn’t done. Don’t you see that waning crescent moon? There is still a little bit of light left, and leaving it for dead doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. Would you be so kind as to turn me back into a wolf? It won’t take me long. Just one more howl. One last bite, to finish what I have started. Please. Turn me back before it’s too late. Before my heart turns into a bird’s, and I forget what mercy is.
I don’t remember the first moon that I ever saw. I never bothered to keep track of all the new moons that took its place. I used to howl with my eyes closed, but that word, new, prepared me for this day. For this new bird, that soon will take my place. And I can say, from the bottom of this heart that won’t be mine for much longer, that there is no resentment on my part. People change. They die countless deaths during the course of their life. And I am glad that mine can still be counted among the first. I am glad that I was a wolf and I got to die young. Before there was too much or too little blood in my mouth. Because this bird won’t be able to blame me for anything. But he has wings, and something tells me that his replacement won’t be as forgiving as I am.
It’s my fault. I never should have listened to that wolf. I was just a child and I didn’t know that he was howling at the moon. I thought that once he had dreams too, and the stars were the holes that wolf had made in the night. I thought that he howled, night after night, to keep those dreams alive, outshining all the disappointments in his life. And I tried to be just like him. I pecked a thousand holes. I followed my dreams and left a map behind. Of my devotion. Of my efforts. Of my sacrifices. I wanted to know that everything had been worth it. But when I looked back there was no light coming out of those holes. I wanted reassurance. Something undeniable. Something written in the stars. I never wanted to hear the answer my heart would give. Because I always knew that it was the easiest of preys, and it wouldn’t take much, just a cloudy sky, for my heart to declare that I had wasted my life.
One day I will fly to the moon and I will peck a hole in it. I can barely bring myself to eat worms now, and, twenty years from now, I know that I won’t feed those same worms to any child of mine. I would rather turn the moon into a nest, and feed all its light to a wolf cub. Until the sun runs out of milk, and it sinks one last time, taking the horizon, and all the other lines that keep us apart, with him. The ones that make me hate myself for flying, when others can’t, and would make that wolf cub hate himself for spilling blood, before others had the chance.
I don’t know what I am trying to accomplish. I know that the moon doesn’t stay full, no matter how desperately the wolves howl. I know that leaves fall to the ground, in yellows and reds, in browns the color of dried blood, and that is all the cue most birds need to fly away. Somewhere those yellows and reds still hold on to their warmth. I am a bird too. But I can’t seem to spread my wings. My beak remains closed, and I can’t help pecking holes. I don’t know what I am trying to prove. I already know that I am not enough. That I need more than my own company not to freeze to death. My own words do nothing to warm the silence that surrounds me. This loneliness that, if I were the moon, if I were a tree or any other bird, I would blame for everything. I know that I am not enough. But I don’t know what I will do once I start pecking holes in you, and I find no warmth there.
There is no comparison between a bird like me and a wolf. Have you seen the holes I have pecked? That darkness is waiting to be filled with songs, unlike the darkness in the mouths of the wolves, that is and always will be full of screams. I can fill someone else’s heart with my songs. I can bring them joy, I can even bring tears to their eyes. My songs were always meant to haunt someone else, unlike those screams that don’t haunt anyone, not even the wolves. And even when they howl, they barely graze the moon. Have you ever seen a single drop of blood in any of the craters of the moon? Me neither. Like I said, there is no comparison.