Quoted By:
The amount of variety in this relatively small park alone was <span class="mu-i">inspiring.</span>
Tiny rodents with hypnotic eyes and built-in masks (maybe twisted relatives of racoons?!)! Enormous centipedes with poison <span class="mu-i">dripping</span> from every part of them and cries like nails on a chalkboard!
You and Mary had taken up residence by a small pond, and you'd almost felt blessed to be shot with a gun of water soon after. A small flock of blue, fluffy ducklings were trying to ward you off, sprinkling your face and clothes with water and trying to blow wind at your face... a few splashes of water was all it took to somehow scare them off, and the incident left you laughing like a child next to a very confused Mary.
That was honestly what this felt like at times: childlike. Like all the playfighting you'd do with the pups back home when they were little, or all the running around you'd do in the stables and pens. Even watching Mary brought back a distant memory of running between sheep in a flock... it was a miracle you hadn't been squished by them, come to think of it. There was little wonder as to why your mother had been so worried.
You shook that thought away. For the first time in quite a while now, it was hard not to feel intense joy-- joy without caveat, no less.
Despite how strange the surroundings were-- despite the fact that the little starlings on bush's branches would get into dogfight-like brawls with their prey instead of just doing the deed, despite the fact that the lilypads were now walking and the fish were now jumping higher than the trees, despite the fact that you were currently massaging a sleepy bug on your shoulders... it all felt so normal, in the moment. Like this was how your life was meant to be from the start.
Florian was having a whale of a time. You'd let the little guy go with Mary, gallivanting around with his slowly-rotting nutberry companion without a care in the world, stopping to study every flower like it was a school assignment and constantly squeaking things in your or Mary's direction. To your surprise, Taylor seemed almost <span class="mu-i">responsive</span> to the squeaks, leading you on a long tangent that took up 3 entire pages of your notebook-- what if they could speak with each other? Did they have a universal lingua franca, no matter the species-- chittering with delight or curiosity and always making sure to chitter things back to you like some kind of strange interpreter.
It was a freeing sensation. To just lay in the grass, writing about all these wondrous beings, letting Taylor crawl around on your shirt and fix up any ripped patches or watching Florian and Mary try to approach one of the centipedes without getting its attention, leaning slightly on Andrew's donkey and feeling its slow heart beat against your head... to live the rest of your life like this, you would give anything.
