Dear friend,
you asked at Belleteyn if I left after all those good nights because I was scared. Perhaps I was. Perhaps that is what led me to this very moment. Now, for the first time, I understand real fear. Never seeing you and Ciri again. Much is uncertain on this Continent. The dangers we've seen foretell an even more menacing future. But, Yen, please know I will learn to trust you again. You, Ciri, and I, we belong together.
Your friend, Geralt.
For at least as long as I’ve been involved in nonhuman communities, there’s always kind of been this emphasis on not just identifying as nonhuman but also being able to accurately label that identity under the massive amounts of terms that exist to describe every variation in personal experience one can have. Hearted identities were seemingly given the “middle child treatment” and experiences like flickers or links or even frequent cameo shifts were often harshly criticized. And while I’m glad to see much of that has changed now, there is still quite a bit of label pushing and a hierarchy of experiences.
Before I distanced myself from the therian community, I was a frantic mess trying to label everything and anything I experienced just to feel some validation among my peers. I lost sight of who I really was deep down because my focus was more on the labels and how to fit them than my actual lived experiences. Now though, I feel so much relief and confidence in my identities that I hardly ever question or doubt myself anymore. Not having a billion words to juggle around stresses you out a lot less, trust me.
All this is not to say I don’t sometimes like to have words to describe my experiences though! Specifically as of late, I’ve been questioning what the squirrel means to me. I sat with the possibility of being squirrelhearted for a bit, but that just doesn’t seem right; squirrels don’t feel anywhere near the same as bears, coyotes and Twilight for me. It occurred to me though that whenever I see squirrels, or objects and art depicting them, I immediately think of my daemon. Her tiny voice in the back of my mind squeaks with excitement at recognizing herself, the same way I do when I see a wolf. “It’s me”, she says, “it’s Philomena”, I say. I get this warm, aching feeling in my stomach like I just have to have the object, that I just have to be with my daemon in the physical.
So I wondered what I could call this feeling, an almost hearted adjacent experience. And I remembered the word I “coined” for such things as this - and many other types of feelings of being drawn to something -: Calling.
Squirrels call to me because of Philomena. I like them because they remind me of my squirrel-girl. I like watching their movements because it helps me visualize Philomena. I feel drawn to squirrels because they make me feel closer to her. They bring her to the front of my mind and briefly give us back some closeness to each other that we’ve lost recently. Without Philomena, squirrels don’t mean much to me. It’s only because she’s a red squirrel do I feel an affinity with them.
PHEW this piece took forever! I'm really REALLY happy with it, though! It's a redraw of an old piece from 2020, of my character Elli sitting on her balcony and painting a portrait of her husband :3c