deer and death (autopilot without a destination.)

there was a deer head in my dad’s cabin, right by the porch door. not in a way that felt important, just placed there like anything else that had been around long enough to become part of the room. across from it was this ripped-up couch, salvaged from my old house i used to fall asleep on, especially when the wood heat made everything feel heavy and slow. i’d drift off without thinking much, and then wake up in the same position, except now i was looking straight into its eyes. waking up into that stillness always felt like the real moment.

the eyes didn’t look like anything dramatic. no fear, no pain, not even peace. just paused. like whatever came before had been cut off mid-thought.

and i’d sit there, still half asleep, trying to fill in everything that came before that pause.

i’d imagine it moving first. that always felt easiest to believe. moving through woods that probably weren’t that different from the ones outside the cabin, stepping through cold, dewy mornings where the air hangs for a second before disappearing. it would’ve known how to exist without thinking about it, where to go and stop, when something felt wrong. its life would’ve been made up of those small, constant decisions that don’t feel like decisions at all when you’re inside them. it’s hard to picture it staying still.

that’s the part i really hate coming to. because now it’s stuck doing the one thing it probably almost never did.

and i think that’s why it lingers with me, because over just being dead, now it's fixed in place. locked into a version of itself that doesn’t match what it used to be. like all the motion got pulled out of it and replaced with this permanent display of something that only looks alive if you don’t think too hard about it.

taxidermy as an outline

taxidermy kind of lives in that gap. it tries to hold onto the shape of something after everything real has already left. there’s care in it, and history, and intention, people preserving animals for study, for memory, for proof that something existed in a certain way at a certain time. but even at its best, it’s still just an outline. a lot of people i’ve seen even do their pets and turn them into stools or something you’re supposed to live around, which i can’t fully wrap my head around. it’s all a body arranged into familiarity. a version of life that can’t move anymore but is expected to look like it could.

the deer in that cabin wasn’t the deer anymore.

but it also wasn’t nothing.

it became something in-between, a quiet onlooker and a reminder that motion doesn’t last the way it feels like it should.

and i think, without really realizing it, i started seeing myself in that more than i wanted to.

the need to run from everything

not in a literal way, just in that same feeling of being stuck in a version of yourself that doesn’t match what’s inside. and for me that’s where something deeper starts to show through. like being a tgirl isn’t just about how other people see you, it’s about that constant split between movement and being fixed. between who you are in your head and what gets read back to you from the outside. there’s this weird pressure to be legible, to be understood, to “pass” in a way that makes people stop looking too closely, but at the same time there’s that prey instinct kicking in, telling you to not be seen at all. and to move, to disappear, to stay just out of reach. and those two things don’t sit well together. because survival starts to feel tied to both being perceived correctly and not being perceived at all. like you’re always adjusting, always aware, and always thinking about how you’re coming across, moving through space, and how long you can stay somewhere before it feels wrong. it’s not even always conscious, it’s just there like a muscle memory. the same way that deer would’ve known when to run without needing a reason.

but then you get stuck inside.

rain, snow, those long grey days where everything outside feels shut down and you’re just in your room with yourself. and suddenly that instinct to move has nowhere to go. it turns inward instead and starts eating at you. and that’s when it starts to feel like being trapped in your own body, your own head. like you’re pacing without moving. like something in you is telling you to run but there’s nowhere to run to.

i’ve had nights where that feeling gets so loud i just leave.

no plan or real destination, its just getting in the car and driving because it feels like the only way to quiet it. i drove for six hours once on a random wednesday night, just following roads until they stopped feeling familiar. and even then it wasn’t ever about going somewhere, it was about not being where i was. about proving to myself that i could still move, that i wasn’t stuck like that deer, fixed into something i didn’t choose. but obviously it never fully solves it.

because eventually you stop the car. eventually you come back. and whatever you were trying to outrun is still there, just quieter for a bit.

and that same feeling shows up in smaller ways too. like trying to create, trying to make music, trying to code any of this, trying to live, trying to do anything that feels like forward motion, and instead just opening something, closing it, telling yourself later. autopilot without a destination.

and from the outside it probably looks fine. like you’re still here, still doing things, still existing in a way that makes sense to everyone else. the same way that deer still looks like a deer. but inside, nothing lines up the way it’s supposed to. the movement that used to feel natural starts feeling forced, or distant, or just gone entirely. and that’s where the burnout sits for me. a slow shift into stillness. into being stuck doing the one thing you almost never did.

prey, poem and death!

i carry a rabbit’s foot on my bag.

it started as a charm, something small and symbolic, but it ended up feeling closer to a reflection. i’ve always felt connected to animals like that, rabbits, deer, in a way that’s less about identity labels and more about instinct. that constant alertness. the feeling of being something soft in a world that isn’t. always aware, always ready to move, even when you don’t know where you’d go.

prey, more than anything.

and being prey means understanding that survival is movement. it’s staying light, staying aware, staying just out of sight. but it also means understanding what happens when that stops. when movement gets taken away, when you’re seen too clearly, when you’re fixed in place. that’s the part that loops back to the deer. that’s the part that’s hard not to internalize.

madison wrote this, and it keeps sitting in the back of my head whenever i start thinking like this:

the “i don’t know” is really important to me. because none of this really lands on a clear answer. burnout, fear, identity, death, they all kind of blur together at a certain point. they all carry that same feeling of something ending without a clean explanation, of being left with what’s left and trying to decide if it means anything or not.

death feels like the final version of that. the one bridge you can’t even pretend to rebuild. just a full stop where everything before it suddenly becomes a memory, an object, a story. a mounted head. a charm on a bag. a poem someone wrote in their free time and left in the pile with the rest of them.

but it doesn’t always feel as heavy as it sounds. sometimes it just feels quiet.

like waking up on that couch, staring into those glass eyes, and not feeling afraid. just aware that you’re looking at something that used to move, the same way you do now. something that didn’t know it would end up like that. something that probably never imagined a stillness that would last this long.

and that’s the part that matters most.

not the ending itself, but the fact that right now, at least, i’m not there yet.

still moving. or at least trying to.