The buzzard and the squirrel

Everything is the same, never better.

The same…

The same….

The same…..

The same tiresome playlist on the radio, same trees clawing overhead, same beat-to-death roads and same jarring potholes. I feel my breath catch under the sameness as I drag myself to work. The weight is becoming too much to bear. A snapping approaches, but then something startles the sameness: a tiny beacon in the monotonous landscape.

The squirrel lies on the side of the road, petite paws neatly tucked under her chin. A breeze sways her fur, not in a way that would disturb her, but in a way that a fan tussles the hair of a napping child, ensuring they don’t begin to sweat. Her ears are perked and lips in a sort of grin – she is perfect, sleeping in an almost angelic state.

But she isn’t really sleeping though, is she?

No.

She’s dead, struck by one of the same cars that takes this same route each morning to work, just like I do.

I’m in awe at how intact she is, completely obscuring having been rolled over by furious tons of metal and plastic and rubber. At how her insides must be liquified: masked mush beneath an immaculate skin cloak, the façade somehow untouched by her reaper.

My admiration for the squirrel and her ability of concealment carry me to work, the distraction lifting a bit of the crushing day-to-day. But, as always, my drive has to eventually come to an end.

And, as always, I’m sure to put on my mask before entering. Experience knows to not let anyone see my faltering under life’s refusal to be better.

At lunch, a coworker shares some of her own heaviness. I begin to think that maybe, just maybe, I could try removing the mask. Just with her, just for a second.

It would be solidarity, right? Two women, having worked at the same place together for almost a decade, passing between them trauma and comfort instead of the usual flow from one person to another.

But I realize almost immediately that I’ve made a huge mistake. She is unable to hide the disgust creeping up the wall of her face, it pulling her lips and brows into tandem distortion.

“Maybe you should find someone to talk to. Someone professional, you know. Get you some Prozac.”

She slides her lunch into the trash and hurries slowly back to her station, a turtle reentering her shell, attempting at inconspicuousness. I slide my mask back on, gently giving her a smile. I remember again: only I deserve to be the ass carrying another’s burden in addition to my own.

Yet, my brain can’t help but be poisoned by her words as I return to my own station. I already know the outcome of her suggestion. A therapist will say:

You have a disease.

‘The blues’ are a disease.

It’s something wrong with you, but here, take this, it’ll fix you.

But the therapist fails to take into account anything else I tell him.

That the actual disease is raising a mother who “hates my guts” (her words, not mine), and whose favorite pastime is different forms of abuse, gleefully sure that my dad, still wishing for the son that he never had, will remain an ostrich, head in the sand.

That it’s the intergenerational trauma that shaped my mother, that stole my little brother, that snakes its bloody fingers around my own throat.

That it’s the ceaseless fearing for my own children, having broken the cycle of trauma for them but still not being enough to ensure that they will have adequate healthcare, or education, or security, or a livable future.

That it’s the gnawing feeling that I will be forced to abandon them, having been exposed with impunity to toxic chemicals – chemicals having “positive associations” with the potential cancer on which I await results.

No, I’m not a disease. I’m a symptom.

A symptom of familial and societal diseases, curable comorbidities yet overlooked by therapists and legislators and those with the wealth and influence to change things. They are always there, always the same.

But I’m not really only a symptom though, am I?

No.

I’m also the fucking squirrel, a smiling façade hiding insides obliterated by furious tons of this fucked up society who, if I attempt to remove the mask, simply scoffs, telling me to take a Prozac and suck it up.

I now feel the break, fully, overwhelmingly. The straw has finally snapped the ass’ back. My surroundings stagger, darken, become confused.

Things refocus when I am on the road. I must have left work without notice, though I am not aware of how. I am only aware that I must make my way back to the squirrel.

Only she is no longer alone.

Standing over her is a buzzard. Pausing only briefly to watch me pull over, the buzzard’s beak slices through the squirrel with dangerous ferocity, sucking down purple-red flesh bubbling from under the squirrel’s cloak, her insides spilling from the shattered dam.

I float, separated from passing time, baptized in the scene before me.

Ripping, tearing.

Tearing, ripping.

Resolute destruction.

Until the squirrel has been turned wholly inside out. And then she is clean.

Her cloak having been torn away completely, all that remains of the squirrel is shiny white bone.

The buzzard gives a discerning flap of her wings, confirming her work. Then her eyes, meeting mine, pierce me to the marrow, and she flies off to digest the squirrel.

I sit, mesmerized in front of the repeating ribs, tiny ivory curves swaying back and forth in the breeze. Words I’ve read somewhere before oscillate through my brain in rhythm with the ribs. Sometimes you have to have a breakdown before you break through.

Yes.

Sometimes you have to irreparably shred the cloak, shatter it to bits and unflinchingly expose to the world vulnerable, beaten viscera that prove you are a symptom, not an illness. Then you must digest them.

And sometimes the mask needs to be ripped from society, forcing its diseased organs within to undergo beautiful, fantastic destruction. Tear it all down, strip out the dead flesh, until it is clean. And we can no longer be made just symptoms.

Today I woke as the squirrel, tomorrow I will wake as the buzzard.