I'll give some context for each because, out of the context of that blog, these pieces are safer, and say less. Which is a curious thing.
Context will follow in italics.
Pictures added for fun-ness.
Games.
Today, I read that no player could become greater than the game itself. But if this is true, then what are you? No greater than the game, perhaps, but something more, something different from the players, at least. As far as I am concerned, you are currently, presently, and until further notice, a part of the game. And the game agrees.
I feel very divided. On the one side, I am eager; I am giddy. I know the rules, and I want to play. My hands shake, and the dice chatter between them. Thin walls and thick windows. Safe, and even a bit silly. But there is an illusory sense of danger (or perhaps it is something else entirely) that shimmers over it all, like crepe paper, and it elicits a very real sense of thrill.
On the other side, I am still scaffolding. I am not yet ready to play games with larger shadows than my own, and sometimes, I am not sure if I want to. I am very fond of familiar, comfortable things, slow things, easy things. Play, however, requires a great deal of running around, a great deal of care in gestures, in moving and changing and shifting things, just slightly to the left, so that a picture will be made. It is all very interesting, but all very busy, as well....
This was not a very old blog. This was before I swallowed my legos. This was before I lost (read: left at home) my book of rules.
Departures.
"I miss you."
If technology wasn't such a weird, convoluted thing some times, I'd tell you this, as plain and simply as it's been knocking against my brain the last couple of weeks.
It is a bit stubborn and unreal of me, I suppose, because I want to send you these words and be done with it. I don't want to have to worry about what it means if you don't send word back, or what it means if you do, or what you'll think I mean in either situation.
I want to tell you how I feel and then run away from it, because I need to say it more than I need to mean it at this point.
I still want to say this sometimes, but I'm not sure how much for me, how much for you. I don't think I was running then, but I would be now; you'd be uncanny now, unless you came to me, I think.
Which I wouldn't mind at all. I think.
Defenses.
...But, although I do agree with your conclusion that something larger, something profound awaited Birdie, I do not think I agree it would have been as convenient as seeing the sun over the hills. It would have been a lovely literary image; however, I do not think this pretty image does justice to just how messy the process of change truly is (especially that which Birdie attempted). Things are gained; but things are lost. For every timid step forward, we have taken five backwards--through the mud, the grit, the blood, slipping and sliding through the decaying symbols of a world that has begun to nibble and gnaw at your toes.
My point is: it takes more than a night to reach the dawn.
This is in defense of a character I felt got a bit lambasted by someone who I thought was above lambasting. Mostly, I just like the word lambasting.
But I believe this even more now; partly because I reread the story, partly because of Parasites. Transformations are hardly beautiful, immediate things. They are not magicked. They are tortuous and drawn out. They are ugly. They are monstrous. For me, a good werewolf book doesn't blur lines: you must become something awkward, something horrible and miserable before you can be fully changed. You must fever. You must be wretched for a time.
Then you get your daylight.
On the unending ends of things
This, here, this--I will never be rid of this, not unless I chase it out with something else, and then I shall be once again occupied. And even then--there is something of the first that lingers in the second, if only in their opposing but similar purposes, their trade-off (but cumulative, but me) existences.
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