Cocoa Pebbles were on sale that day for $3.29. I hadn’t had cereal in years, forgotten to my childhood and replaced with eggs and toast. But I didn’t have a toaster or a stove in the dorm, and the eggs in the dining hall were gray, and the bread mildly stale. Pebbles were the winner today, and I grabbed two boxes under my arm, coupled with a half-gallon of milk and Annie’s Mac and Cheese, a splurge from the usual Kraft. I lugged my haul back to the dorm, breakfast and dinner for the week.

It became a tradition, this weekly CVS run (sometimes Target, if we were willing to stretch our legs). Sometimes, I went alone. Sometimes, one of my many roommates would tag along. We would stock up on shelf-stable dry goods to avoid having to eat every meal through the dining plan, the one that loans or parents were paying thousands of dollars for. My selections were made by what was on sale—I would indulge in all the sugary cereals I hadn’t had since I was twelve, which were especially appealing at 2 AM after several rounds of drinks.

There was a nostalgia to cereal, and I was just reaching the age where I could experience nostalgia. A box of Apple Jacks would bring me back to a morning on a cabin balcony, watching over a lake and surrounded by family. Frosted Flakes, and I’m back to a sunny morning before a soccer game that I would beg my parents not to go to, in favor of sitting inside the nice AC. For a moment, I could escape to this simpler time, when I had easier things to worry about, like rec sports and times tables and assigned chapter books. Back when adulthood was a foreign world, a lifetime away, yet full of promise and adventure. Back before the constant deadlines and the dread that the fate of your entire career (and adult life) rested on a single exam, a single class, a single interview.

The cereal habit outlived college—I could finally get cereal at a reasonable price from the grocery store (though, by the time I graduated, certain name brands had climbed to the once outrageous cost they had been posted for at CVS). I would eat a bowl of Honey Bunches, before donning my work clothes and pretending to be an adult. A bowl of Special K, if I was trying to be healthy, and a bowl of Krave, if I decided I was not. I should move on to something more filling, more adult. Sometimes, I try to make a switch, and I fill my fridge with eggs and my pantry with oatmeal, but the habit never outlives the week, and I find myself reaching for another box off the grocery shelf. I can have this one thing, I think. Please, let me just have this one thing. I can pretend for ten minutes to be a carefree college student, or a hopeful elementary schooler, unburdened by the expenses and futility of adulthood.

One day, I know, I will be 70, or 80, or 90, and I will be opening a box of cereal. I will remember being in my 20s, and how I had my whole life ahead of me. I hope, by then, that I will be content with where I am, and not wishing I could go back. I hope my nostalgia is rosy, and that I will remember all the decades of eating cereal with fondness, and still, be content with my present. Life is fleeting, and hard, at all of its stages, and yet, there is cereal—and how grateful should I be to exist in the same timeline as Cocoa Pebbles.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

A/N: Inspired by the box of empty Cocoa Pebbles sitting on my kitchen counter that I scarfed down in two days.

A bag of chips or cookies would cheer me up. And I suppose it was nice to see the friends that had different teachers than me this year. We would run around outside, play make-believe, start our own clubs. Be a kid, though I didn’t realize how special it was at the time.

Then, parents would arrive to scoop up my schoolmates. I made friends with some of the late-stayers, but we were tired and over socializing, and we sat there. Waiting. Twenty minutes is an eternity to a nine-year-old. And god forbid my dad had to stay “late” at work, and couldn’t pick me up until 5:15.

I didn’t hate afterschool, not really. I only hated the limbo of it all, where time seemed to stretch forever.

The days sped up, of course, as I grew older, and I lost the time I so desperately wished would pass as a child. There have been a few days in my adult life where I have experienced that sense of “waiting” that plagued me as a child, like when I got dropped off at my dorm in another state. I didn’t know anyone, and I sat and waited on my twin XL bed, not sure what I was supposed to do. My roommates wouldn’t arrive until that night. Eventually, I grew bored and went outside, and walked up and down campus. When I managed to look up from the GPS on my phone, everything was new. The brick buildings, pressed against modern finishes. Swathes of well-cut grass and strategically placed pathways. Groups of students walking by, laughing. Not thinking about where they were headed, or caring about their surroundings. How I longed to be them, settled into a routine where I had friends and classes and homework. I didn’t want to be on this never-ending walk—I wanted to be there, at some undetermined point in my future, where I had everything figured out. But I had no choice, but to continue to exist, and wait for time to pass.

Now, college is a faraway dream, and every rent bill comes sooner than the last. I think about seeing a friend again and find that months have passed. I think, a year isn’t too long to stay at a job that I don’t hate, but don’t love. I think, it’s winter again, but it’ll pass after only a few short months, and I’ll feel the sun on my face again soon. I think, I won’t be able to see my parents until the holidays, but that’s not too far away.

The days will pass quickly, and I will get to where I want to be.

My first gray hair catches me by surprise, and I choose to ignore it. That is my future, and it is far ahead of me.

Some days, I wish I could have more of those limbo days, where time stretches on and on and on. Others, I am glad that I always have something to do, or something to look forward to. I can push through now to get to then, and at least I am the one in control.

The great thing about time—it will pass me by regardless of how I feel towards it, and leave me in the dust in the end.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I eat breakfast, drink coffee. Get dressed for a run. I am moving through my routine slower than I would like, but I am always moving slower than I would like. I stay in bed too long, dawdle over my coffee. Some days, I read a book. Most days, I am trapped by the screen. In a mild panic, I rush out the door. Tomorrow, I will be more efficient.

I go on my run. I have a podcast playing that I am not fully listening to. But I need the company of small voices in my ear to drown out the beautiful stillness of the early morning. I’ve tried to be present before, listen to nothing, and take in the trees around me. I make it about two minutes before I start thinking about work, or something worse, and the run no longer feels like mine. So, podcasts it is.

I go to work and wear a different pair of headphones. I listen to different music. I jump between tasks, moving too fast to give myself time to process the one I’m currently on. My head hurts by the end of the day. I promise myself that tomorrow, I will move more slowly, take my time. I’ll try to understand something fully, and I won’t want to collapse at the end of the day from exhaustion. This, at least, I know that I will fail to do.

I am home, and I can finally relax. Maybe I’ll read tonight. Maybe I’ll write. Play guitar. Watch a movie. I need to give my brain a moment to unwind first, before I can truly relax. The phone screen unlocks. An hour passes. I eat dinner, a frozen meal, like most days, when cooking seems like too much effort (it always does). I’ll read in a minute, I say to myself. I just need a bit more time to decompress.

I get through thirty pages before bed. I write a couple of sentences in the novel I’m supposedly working on. The other four hours of my evening have gotten away from me, but at least I did something.

I wish I could do more.

Tomorrow will be different, I think. I take my daily sleeping pill. I can’t remember the last time I fell asleep without it. At one point, I tried changing my habits. No screens, no eating, no stress before bed. But that required lots of long nights with my thoughts for company, and never reliably resulted in enough sleep. I debate whether tonight will be the night I try to fall asleep naturally again, the night where I finally break my dependency on the pill. I debate this most nights. And, like most nights, I decide against it.

I don’t want to risk not getting enough sleep before tomorrow, I think, as I take my quarter of a pill.

After all, I have so much planned.

. . .

A/N: If you like my work, consider donating to this link. This supports my writing, as well as the charity I am fundraising for as part of my marathon training! https://wl.donorperfect.net/weblink/weblink.aspx?name=E145189&id=91&cfifid=272

And as always, comments, subscribes, and likes appreciated <3

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

The cat yawns, awakened from her slumber, and her breath sends great gusts of wind across the earth; currents begin to swirl in the oceans. She licks her paw, then lifts it over her head to groom herself. Dander and fur scatter over the land, and trees grow where the seeds land.

The cat coughs up a hairball, and the moon appears, yellow and bright. Her pupils widen. She’s done this before, and she wants to pounce, catch the ball in front of her. But something captures her attention in the distance, more intriguing than the moon, a crinkling sound coming from somewhere we will never know. She crouches. Her eyes dart back and forth, and she wiggles her body in anticipation. Then, the pounce. The moon is safe, but the world shakes from her momentum. Cracks form under the surface, and land collides into hills and mountains, and separates into valleys and trenches. She catches her prey, then lies down. The world settles, changed, but unbroken.

Satisfied with her hunt, she flops over on her side and begins to purr. The animals of the world, buried deep underground and fast asleep, register the deep rumble. Only a few awake, but they are pulled to the sound. They wake those around them in excitement, and they begin their trek upwards, drawn towards a comfort that they don’t understand. They reach the surface, and they scatter, each animal thinking they know the best path to reach the beautiful noise.

Then, the purring stops, and the animals stop with it, dispersed throughout the world.

The cat lets out a meow. Not a playful chirp, not a friendly greeting. It is a desperate, lonely yowl that doesn’t stop, that pierces and tears and breaks. Leaves start to wilt, and the creatures try to retreat back underground, but they are trapped on the surface, and forced to listen to the dreadful howl. What happened to the lovely purr of before? they wonder in agony. Make it stop! Make it stop!

There was one last being that hadn’t woken up with the rest. They arise now. But unlike the others, they don’t cringe away from the yowl—they are drawn to it, and realize what must be done.

The human calls out, “Here, kitty, kitty!”

The voice is faint in the cat’s ear—she doesn’t hear it at first.

“Here, kitty kitty. There, kitty, kitty.”

Over and over.

The cat has to pause her howling to take a breath. That’s when she hears the voice, and it is curious enough that she chooses to wait another moment before resuming her cries. She cocks her head, ears twitching.

“Here, kitty, kitty. It’s alright, kitty, kitty.”

She realizes, or maybe she simply hopes, that they are calling out to her. Nothing had ever done so. She is hesitant, distrustful. She had been alone for so long, entertaining herself in the sky. And entertained she had been—for many millenia, she batted at fuzzy balls that became stars, chased ropes that connected planets, scratched planes of space that flung rocks everywhere. But she had done all these activities all by herself, and a deep, unending loneliness had grown in her heart.

The voice continues.

“Hi, kitty, kitty. Shh, kitty, kitty.”

It would be scary, leaving her play pen of vast, unending space, to go towards something unfamiliar. She lets out a pitiful meow of uncertainty.

“I love you, kitty.”

And then she knows, she must be brave. She shrinks herself down, then down some more. She is not sure how big this human is, but they must be tiny. The whole world was tiny, but now it is huge.

The cat can’t find the human at first. She is worried she has made a grave mistake, and she starts to cry again, but her voice is lost in the leaves. No one can hear her anymore.

Except, of course, the human, who has found her, despite her small voice. The human kneels down beside her, and they stare at each other. A hand reaches out tentatively, and she backs away at first, then remembers that this is what she wanted, and she allows the scratch behind her ears. A flood of bliss flows through her, replacing the loneliness. She presses her head against the hand, asking for more, more, more.

The deep rumble of her purr returns, and even though the animals can no longer hear it, the human can. The cat and the human understand that this is how the world is meant to be. The two of them, side by side.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

A/N: In honor of my new girl, Peach, who is already changing my life.

I built up a herd of elephants. Ellie, Eleanor, Ella. More names that I have forgotten, but am sure were all girl names that started with an E. I would sleep in my nest of pachyderms, selecting one to cuddle every night (usually Elefante, except for when I worried that the other elephants felt left out).

My favorite ride at Disney as a child was Dumbo, unsurprisingly. My family would do the “Dumbo Dash”, where we would arrive right as the park opened and make a beeline to the circle of flying elephants. I would fly up, up, and up, squealing, “Elefante! Elefante!” and my parents would laugh and say, “Yes, just like Elefante!”

They tried putting on Dumbo the movie once. To this day, I still haven’t watched the movie in its entirety—seeing the elephant in distress and humiliation made me cry and cry and cry. “The elephant will be fine!” my mom said worriedly, caught off guard by how upset I was. “It’s only a story, it’s not real. The elephant will be happy at the end!” I cried harder. I think she fast-forwarded to show me said happy elephant, but I wasn’t consoled. I clung to Elefante closer that night, and hugged all of my herd individually and told them that I would keep them safe.

…

In 2001, researchers discovered mitochondrial DNA evidence that supported the differentiation of the African elephant into two species—the African bush elephant, Loxodonta africana, and the African forest elephant, L. cyclotis. Previously, there had been physical differences pointing to this separation, but due to geographic co-mingling and some other science-y factors, many scientists were skeptical. And these doubts were not entirely lifted with the mtDNA evidence, which was limited and only showed the genetic history of the female population. It wasn’t until 2021 that the forest and savanna elephants were recognized as two separate species, after far more comprehensive DNA evidence and genome mapping.

When I was 10, there was a baby African elephant at the zoo. The elephants at this zoo were likely savanna elephants, though that classification didn’t exist then, and I certainly didn’t care. I still kept Elefante in my bed, but I had removed much of the herd, since I was “too old” and didn’t want to seem uncool.

I was entranced by the calf following her mom around, unstable on its four legs, poorly flinging dirt around in an attempt to mimic her mom. The zookeeper told us how similar the baby elephants were to us. How, after an infinite time in their mother’s belly (22 months!), they remain reliant on their mother for many years. The females never really leave the matriarchal herd, and the males will wander off around adolescence.

“The girls never leave their mom?” I asked, interrupting the zookeeper. “Why?”

“Well,” the zookeeper said, bending down in that condescending way adults do when talking to kids. “It’s something that’s ingrained in their behavior. Elephants are very social creatures, and they form deep, lifelong bonds.”

“What about the boys, then, why do they leave?”

The zookeeper laughed. “They’re a bit more free-spirited, I guess. Though the herd will welcome in a male elephant occasionally, the girls tend to stick together for life.”

I wanted to ask more, but the zookeeper had already moved on to the next kid who had wandered up. The rest of the trip, I couldn’t shake this interaction, the zookeeper’s words running around in my ten-year-old head. When I got home that night, I begged my parents to get the rest of the herd out of the attic.

I was supposed to be their elephant mother, and I had abandoned them. I gave them all a hug in the way I was too old to do. They stayed on my bed for the whole year, until the memory of the zoo faded out in favor of societal pressure.

…

There is also the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus, defined by its smaller size and ears. The females (and some males) have a distinct lack of tusks, which I always found fascinating. One of the defining physical traits of the elephant, missing. All of my elephants had tusks—toy manufacturers favored the trait in the way that evolution, at least for the Asian elephant, never did.

Tusks serve a real purpose for survival in the wild, making it easier for elephants to lift objects, gather food, and defend themselves. So why would evolution decide the Asian elephant was better off without them? The basis for this reality remains unclear, though more recent studies have shown that the impact of human poaching has played a part in selecting for tusklessness, both in Asian and African elephants.

I was aware of poaching at a young age, but it was hard for me to conceptualize the brutal reality of it. Poaching happened so far away from me, and all the conservationists treated it like a thing of the past, always putting a hopeful spin on the story. Moreover, I couldn’t comprehend the scale of human violence and greed. If I couldn’t imagine killing an elephant, how could other people? The elephants I saw in the zoo, on TV, they were all safe. People told me elephants were endangered, but I knew they would never disappear. Elephants were as fundamental to my understanding of the world as water, ever since I was given Elefante as a child. There would be no Earth if there were no elephants.

…

If you look farther back, you’ll find that the Asian elephant is the closest relative to the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius. These creatures had tusks, of course, and tusks that were much, much bigger than those on the modern elephant. The mammoth, contrary to popular belief, was around the same size as the modern African bush elephant. Just fuzzier, with thick brown fur to protect them from the cold.

Much like the modern elephant, the woolly mammoth was also hunted by humans. Early humans would use every part of the mammoth, their fur for warm clothes, their tusks for shelters and weapons, and their meat for food. More noble than modern poaching, where elephants are hunted for the ivory in their tusks, mostly for illegal trade. But animals don’t know the difference between being hunted for money versus survival. They die either way.

Still, the mammoth survived humans for thousands of years, a core part of the landscape. But then warming temperatures reduced the mammoth’s habitat drastically, until the remaining suitable areas were restricted to the Arctic Siberia. The mammoth had nowhere else to go, and the pressure of hunting did not relent.

Around 4,000 years ago, the woolly mammoth disappeared forever.

…

Elefante sits in my bed with me, 23 years after I got her. 5 years after they differentiated between the savannah and the bush elephant, 4,000 years after the woolly mammoth went extinct. She is not fluffy anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time, but she is soft and unbroken. Stuffed animals have gone and come back. Elefante lives with a new herd of squishmallows, puffins, a Kirby and a Waddle Dee. She sits small and proud. I hold her close to my chest, even though she is too small to cuddle comfortably. She is brown, I notice. Like it’s the first time I’m really seeing her.

Elefante, it seems, was never an elephant at all.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

[A/N: Still not sure if I am happy with where this piece went. Maybe one day I’ll return to it, but for now, well, it is what is. I hope you got some enjoyment out of reading. Cheers!]

Sources:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/12/8/250490/235345/Tusks-testosterone-and-personality-in-male-Asian

https://www.animallaw.info/article/detailed-discussion-elephants-and-ivory-trade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_mammoth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_elephant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_elephant

https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-split-african-elephants-two-species

The technology is a miracle, dropped from the sky. I never thought I was good at coding—I could never remember the syntax, and the logic would run circles in my head. I was a fraud, only in this career due to luck and privilege. No one has to find out, I think, not if I use this. I code whole features from scratch, the services, the controllers, the repositories, the user interfaces, all coming together in one fell swoop. I scroll on my phone, watching my servant computer build, and think, I am a god.

. . .

“Use AI,” the boss says, a little louder. The generated tests always fail the first time, no matter how I word my prompts, and I spend hours arguing with the imaginary voice to fix them. I notice the cracks in my creation that I had been willfully blind to before. Unnecessary lines here, security breaks there. An entirely unrelated feature, broken. I go back, look through the generated work carefully. I spend much longer fixing the code than it would have taken me to just do it myself. Maybe I know more than I gave myself credit for, if I am smarter than a machine.

. . .

The new tool now shows how much each request costs. $0.06, $0.03. Nothing at all really. “Use AI,” the boss says. Then adds, “We’re tracking you.”

I don’t trust the machine anymore. I should code things myself instead. Interviews still require you to code from memory, despite laying off thousands precisely because “manual” coding is no longer necessary. But my brain has already been rewired—I have become great at debugging the AI code output, yet I can’t recall basic principles without the cheat sheet of the entire Internet right in front of me. I vow to practice, to write things by hand, and to solve the useless, arbitrary puzzle questions online. My brain starts to think again. I experience frustration, but in different ways, ones that occasionally lead to the satisfying feeling of hard work well done.

. . .

“Use AI,” the boss says fervently. On a loop, every day. “Use AI. Use AI.”

The deadlines get tighter. People leave and don’t get replaced. The models become better—the coding tests still fail at first, but now It can fix Its own mistakes. I upload miles and miles of plain English for It to reference, so It doesn’t keep making the same error. It learns, and It grows. Not perfect, but far better than at the start.

The tool shows the price for each request going up. $0.10, $0.55, $1.01. I’ve spent $10 for a task that used to cost cents.

“We need this by the end of the day.”

I have no choice. I don’t have time to review the output like I once did. I try to put on guardrails, but who knows if it’s enough. There’s a buzz in my head, constantly. I am reminded of Iron Man. If Tony Stark could build this in a cave, why can’t you? Leadership pushes and pushes and pushes, and I struggle to hang on.

“Use AI.” The words sound like a threat now. They always were, I suppose. I was too blinded by the beauty in the beginning.

I can’t think of the ethical ramifications while I’m here. The bubble of power over the economy It has, the villages It will destroy.

Head down, deliver fast.

I can’t lose this job.

I can’t lose my job.

I can’t–

. . .

“Use AI.” The boss’s voice is back at a whisper, and he smiles. Why would he need to shout?

I smile back, and press “Approve.”

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Further along on the trail, and on my right, I can see all the way to the new luxury apartment buildings. There are no trees between the trail and the buildings–those were cut down two years ago.

I am grateful, at least, that the yearlong sounds of construction have finally stopped.

People spring up like leaves once the weather warms. I am no longer one of the few who dare go out when the weather is freezing, surrounded by only the wildlife and the wind. Chatter floats by me—a couple arguing about the new kitchen island the woman wants, but the man says they can’t afford–a group of college students blasting music on a tinny speaker as they yell at each other to make their voices heard—an old man with cigar, silent, walking at a brisk pace and bringing the smell of smoke to everyone within a twelve-foot radius, making me crinkle my nose–the bikes that whiz on by, only occasionally remembering to say, “On your left!”

The trail is beautiful in a different way than in the winter. A display of humanity and nature together. It’s a good thing, really, that people are outside, and not shut away in tall concrete buildings all the time.

I almost swerve into an electric scooter while avoiding a group walking four across. I don’t fall, but my left toe hurts from where I caught myself. I curse. Maybe if there were fewer of us, I think (I always think). Every summer, there are more people out here, thinking that they are the only ones on the trail. To the cyclist, the runners are in the way, and can’t they just move a little more to the right? To the runner, the cyclists are going too fast, and why won’t they ring their bell as they pass? Both the runners and cyclists are mad at the walkers, who often come in groups, two, three, four across–and the walkers wonder why the runners and cyclists won’t slow down for a bit. What’s the rush?

I miss the solitude of winter. I miss six years ago, when nostalgia paints a fuzzy picture of a trail with more trees and fewer people.

I walk for a few feet to settle my racing heart, then continue on.

. . .

The Eastern Cottontail Rabbit is one of the most common wildlife species in America. Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources, in fact, says that “if no young rabbits were lost from a litter, one pair of rabbits could produce 350,000 offspring in five years.” That’s a lot of bunnies. With an average lifespan of 15 months in the wild, though, most do not live long enough to leave such a legacy. Neither do their children.

Almost every run, I see them by the side of the trail, either pausing to eat the grass or hopping to the next patch of grass to eat. It is a marvel every time I see them. The hot suburban neighborhood I grew up in did not invite the rabbits to stay, and there was not enough swamp left near me where they might have thrived instead—certainly not without driving for 45 minutes.

Now, I can walk outside my door, step onto the trail, and see as many bunnies as I want. Even in the winter, I’ll spot a few, out despite the conditions.

The Eastern Cottontail is a solitary creature and very territorial, only meeting with others of its kind to mate. Despite this, I often will see several rabbits right after the other. I wonder, which one of them is the electric scooter rider, and which one is the casual walker? Both of them feel it is their right, more so than anyone else’s, to be there, doing whatever they want to be doing. Which bunny owns the trunk of that tree, and which owns that bush?

I wonder if the bunny ever wishes there were fewer other bunnies. If that would make the bunny’s life easier, to have all this space dedicated to them only.

The Eastern Cottontail, of course, doesn’t think the way that we do. They must reproduce, for the survival of their species. For once, humans are not the main danger to their kind, though I’m sure they wouldn’t mind fewer roads running through their habitats. They are prey animals, low on the food chain, with a list a mile long of animals that want to eat them. The rabbit is abundant because it has to be.

In captivity, the Eastern Cottontail can live up to 9 years and have as many babies as it wants.

. . .

It is a common fallacy of mankind to believe that we are so different from the natural world around us. Other animals may have a form of consciousness–but we are the ones who can conceptualize and define the idea of consciousness itself. We do things to avoid death, as all animals do. Yet we are so acutely aware of our inevitable demise, that we have constructed grandiose religions throughout our existence to soothe ourselves. Our capacity to learn and change the world around us has far exceeded evolutionary processes, and more of us are living longer than nature ever intended. We view ourselves as the center of the Earth, conquerors of the natural world. Some may oppose such a human-centric view of the world, but all subconsciously subscribe to it.

After all, it is innate for a species to value its own kind above all others. It is instinctive to want to ensure survival and reproduction, no matter the cost. An owl does not consider the lives he is taking as he swoops in for the rabbit. The rabbit does not worry about birthing too many kits. They must reproduce. They must survive.

In my most despairing days, where the state of the world and the problems that humanity has caused overwhelm me, I find it a small comfort to know that we are just doing what any other animal would do. The Eastern Cottontail evolved to reproduce quickly due to its place on the food chain–if that spot changed, and the rabbit found itself with no natural predators, would it slow reproduction? No. If the rabbit developed the ability to recognize negative effects of exploding population growth, would it intentionally have fewer babies? Maybe. But then, who decides which rabbits get to have children? And some of the rabbits, well, they can’t handle realizing how short their lives really are, and their new religion says it’s unnatural not to have babies–they were designed to have this many offspring! But you can’t have your babies here; this is my patch of grass. Oh, you don’t like that? Let’s fight! And maybe we’ll spend so much time fighting that we develop weapons that can end all of rabbitkind, and maybe we’ll create an economy of grass that crushes most of us, yet is too big for any one individual rabbit to change.

Humans are not special. We are only doing what we were designed to do.

I think I am different, better, than the other people on the trail, but I am the same. One of many, taking advantage of the nice weather and the small, preserved area of nature, stamped in the middle of the city.

I finish my run. The trail lets out a breath, the weight of one person lifting from its shoulders.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment