#just some musings on the woes of being a member of an extinct species

[haloraptor]

Mass Exodus

I had feathers once, that much I know. I was covered in feathers, though their color escapes me. My slim fingers were topped with talons, both my feet carrying a hooked claw made famous by Hollywood. I had a tail, though I can’t remember the feeling of it at all, perhaps because I could never move it. I was smaller, closer to the ground, sported lighter bones and sharper teeth. I ran through arid plains and deserts, pouncing on small creatures under the warm Cretaceous sun. At least, I suspect I did. I have no clear memory, have nothing but sparse paleontological records and speculation to use to help me. Even then, to much of the world I am a Boogeyman, a monster that only knows to kill and eat. 

I am no monster. I am but an animal. I am an animal, and I am real. We are real. We are wild, we are free, we have been hunting, playing, surviving and having families millions of years before anyone could think to imply we were mindless.

But now there’s none of us left, none that I have been able to find. I am far from those deserts by both distance and time, far from the sights and smells that might jog my memory. I can’t remember my face. I can’t remember my home. I can’t remember faces of any others I knew, or if I ran with others at all. I can’t remember anything. All I can recall are the faintest sensations, instincts, feelings. Distant and buried like the bones of my brothers and sisters under the baking sands. 

I can’t remember my voice. I’ve been trying to, though my new vocal cords occasionally protest my efforts. I have been trying to find my old voice since I was new to this life. I chirp, growl, hiss, squeak, bark, and trill, searching for a sound that I’ll remember. I grow frustrated when the sound is misclassified, when I’m misclassified, steer my efforts in another direction. Maybe if I chirp just right, another will hear me, another will call back to me. Then I will know I am not alone in this fate, in this strange new body and strange new world that I never should’ve been able to see. 

I look into the hollow eye sockets of long-dead skeletons that I might’ve known once and I can’t remember them. Their calls, their eyes, their scales or plumage, it’s all been lost. I cannot carry their stories. I cannot even carry my own. Why I am here while they are on display, I do not know. I do not understand. 

I weep for those who have no one to live for them, all those other species that have gone before and after me but have gone all the same. I weep for those last survivors of them most of all, because their pain is one that I understand to my core. We all live in a world that has changed beyond us, that has run away without us. That has no more need for us, or has deluded itself into believing as such. None of us can understand why or how it has come to be this way. 

Others with my affliction are luckier than I. They have others they can see, either around them or in special places where creatures are gathered and put on display. Or even still on camera, professional or amateur. I am happy for them. They are not the last of theirs. I hope they take comfort in that. 

It is a cruel fate. To be the last of your species, but not even having the face to prove it. I have hair now like those little mammals I used to pin under my talons. I walk upright on heavier bones, far taller than I was ever meant to be. I can’t sit or move like I used to, my bone structure won’t allow it. Gone are my feathers, my talons, my tail and my teeth, my voice and my memories themselves. A mass exodus of everything I was, and everything I no longer find in my reflection (a reflection I can’t remember clearly). 

Still, I am a velociraptor. I looked the part, once. I had feathers. I had talons. I had a tail. I had fangs. I would run across arid plains and deserts under the warm Cretaceous sun. I hunted, played, and survived millions of years before the words I use to convey all of this could’ve been conceived. 

All of it is gone. The world I knew is gone. The rest of my kind is gone. All but me.

I am one of the last velociraptors left in the world, and I ache for a home that doesn’t exist anymore from a time I can’t remember.