The Change
I don’t like swans. It’s not their freakishly long necks that bother me, it’s what their feet are up to underwater. I can’t handle not being able to see them. Not knowing which direction they are planning on going next scares me!
That used to be the way it was. Now I just feel sorry for them, and part of me loves them. After what I saw by the canal one day last year–
I had been running, donned in my brand-new running clothes and I was thinking about how much I hated swans at the time, actually, which makes what happened next all the stranger. A white shape in the distance, that was what it was. Lying there on the ground, just a white shape and I thought nothing of it.
Approaching the shape I can’t say I was particularly interested. I’d have walked right past it, but at the moment I was approaching it the batteries in my ipod went and I started to curse and look around–I don’t know why, I suppose that’s what running out of batteries can do for you.
My eyes knew what it was immediately, and it was the neck, that was what made me laugh. The swan’s neck was badly broken. It was lying in a heap, clearly long dead. For a while I didn’t know what was happening to me. Was I laughing or crying? I couldn’t tell. When I saw the blood I knew what I was doing, I could feel the tears running down my face. I knelt down next to the animal and I began to cry, harder than I could ever remember.
I reported the crime, of course, and the body was quickly removed. But it changed the way I looked at life and swans forever. So maybe I needed it.
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