the wolf

prose and poetry dedicated to the thing she has become

they watch her the way hunters watch a treeline after sunset, convinced that if they stare long enough something will emerge that justifies the trembling in their hands. she knows the look. she has worn grooves into entire years beneath the weight of it. strangers constructing shrines from fragments of conversation; lovers mistaking possession for devotion; enemies nursing grievances so old they've fossilized into identity. all of them circling, circling, circling, as though the answer to whatever hollow thing gnaws beneath their ribs has her face.

but she is not the answer.
that is the wound.

snow falls thick between the pines. snow gathers in her hair, along her shoulders, between the dark fur of her paws as she moves through the wilderness untouched. not fleeing. not hiding. simply existing beyond the reach of their hands. each step leaves a print so delicate it seems accidental. each breath rises silver against the cold. she dances there sometimes, alone beneath a sky swollen with stars, paws tracing strange patterns into fresh drifts. no audience. no witness. no need.

yet somehow they find her.
they always find her.

they come carrying ropes braided from affection and hatred alike. funny thing, really. the knots look the same. "i love you," says one. "i hate you," says another. both reach for her throat. both demand a piece of flesh. both insist she become smaller, softer, quieter, easier to understand. easier to consume. and when she slips free, when she bares her teeth and vanishes back into the forest, they call her cruel. they call her selfish. they call her monster.

anything but free.
because freedom terrifies people who have spent their lives kneeling before cages.

she can feel their eyes even now. from glowing screens. from crowded rooms. from the corners of conversations where her name is spoken like a prayer or a curse. they think she cannot hear it. think she cannot smell the smoke drifting from the little effigies they build in her likeness. but she hears. she always hears. every fantasy. every accusation. every trembling confession disguised as concern.

and beneath all of it, the same question.
why won't you belong to me?
the forest laughs.
the snow laughs.
the moonlight spilling across her back laughs hardest of all.
for she belonged to the wild long before they learned her name.

and long after their obsessions have burned themselves to ash, after the lovers have found new altars and the haters new saints to crucify, she will still be there beyond the treeline, paws dancing across untouched snow, carrying her loneliness like a crown of white antlers, carrying her heart like a wound that never closes and never kills, beautiful and terrible as winter itself, answering nobody, answering nothing, leaving only tracks behind her and the terrible certainty that they were never chasing her at all.

they were chasing the part of themselves that ran away the moment she arrived.