Chapter Text
She's never felt particularly important, is the thing.
On her paws, she counts reasons she should not be, and she decides to live anyway. Call it selfish self preservation. She is a fern below the hot, hot sun.
She is young until she grows up.
Other cats can do a lot of things that she can do, but better. Other cats can do a lot of things that she cannot do, too. She is solitary and alone, as she'd been at her first moments of conscious waking.
The grasses weave in the soft, gentle breeze and she stalks her way, stalwart, through it on a calm sunny day. Her fur is long, difficult to groom, a soft cream tabby coloring, and terribly difficult to camoflauge with. She must be swift and sneaky. The wind changes and thwarts all of her plans. She feels the climbing vines of despair clog each of her arteries, seize each of her paws, cover her vision in shadowed, rich black.
Her breath comes in deep, heaving mechanicians and even she cannot understand it.
She looks up to the sun, bright and brilliant in its tried and true path—driven in visible grooves to her, like the vastly flowing river—in the pale blue sky at midday. There are clouds, but she does not look at them.
She doesn't feel like a cat.
She is malformed and she knows it.
She collapses to the ground, hungry and dirty yet tired, and shoves herself into the grass and dirt. Like she could root herself there. Like the seed of her small, thumping heart would take. Like she could compete.
She stretches and her branches reach long, bringing shadows upon the earth. Her fur ripples and the coloring of it becomes the gorgeous peach of her petals. She unsheathes her claws and her thorns are what glints in the light.
She escapes herself. She betters herself. She stretches her poor soul thin.
She drinks sunlight. She eats minerals.
The air stutters in her lungs.
But who could she possibly kid.
Gloria's name is a marble she carries in her back pocket.
It goes with her everywhere.
She presses flowers in pretty notebooks she has never used. She wants to learn how to draw, but she's coward about it. Her school notes are framed by trees, ferns, little daisies.
A foster kid in a house she's lived in for two months about to age out of the system.
She doesn't know what she's going to do with herself. She feels out of place and depth. Her fear rips her from sleep and she spends mornings on the bathroom floor trying to pull herself together.
The sun is so bright that it blinds her.
She doesn't know what to do, but she has to make do.
Apprehension teems in her heart like frogspawn as she works, though she wants to switch jobs.
In her hands she scribbles on a job application for the local library.
When she was a kit, she hid behind her mother. Even when the soul of her was gone, the body persisted. For a time.
Forced to brave the winds of the mountain, she leans into what she resists.
If she ever had a name, she cannot remember it.
She names herself Goldenoak.
It grows in her heart, until it bursts from her mouth.
Wings with the likeness of the tiger or persistent birch.
Spill orange into a plastic paint tray and slash its wet skin until black bleeds.
Kill the paint roller; admire its purpose.
These butterflies are befitting their name; O Banded Orange. They hide in the leaves.
She being it. It being her.
It isn't good at thinking, but it'll be damned if it gives up.
Endless growth. Out, out, out.
(And up. And down.)