the time I nearly became a furry was around the same year I heard the word ‘elope’ for the first time which I imagined to mean,  two thirsty lovers falling softly and with enviable athleticism into a big blue landing mat, like the ones used for high-jump. at that age I was mostly alone in my obsession with identifying animals by the shape of their shit, except for a select group of adult men, crusted with too much sun and the shot loneliness of the bush at night. they liked to talk to me about: mercy killing, breeding horses, the deadly scowl of a black mamba and helped me believe I had constant telepathic communion with our dog, who was, as it happens, called Kinky so maybe I was asking for it. the conditions were right, coinciding  with one significant cinematic encounter: Aslan, the lion from The Chronicles of Narnia, who was, as it happens, a big, tawny metaphor for Jesus whose crucified body I routinely coveted during Mass. my eyes making way from the tip of his long sensual foot, along the edge of his belly-flesh, fresh and full like a planet vanishing behind the shadow of a moon. in my mind, a new kind of trinity painted itself in church-wide mosaic haloes. i remember the evening of pleasant internet strolling, mostly Googling, WHERE HAVE ALL THE WOLVES GONE!!!!!!!!!!???????? when something appeared under my excitable cursor, flung at the eyes like a tracking shot of a plastic bag in the sky. anthropomorphism seemed so natural to me then because I already talked to everything, so it wasn’t long until the cocks appeared, which seemed so pink that they couldn’t belong to the blue-jay wearing plaid who was also a car mechanic, that liked to get fucked over the bonnet of a jaguar’s Jaguar. i made a friend: Galianogangster98, who bought rare fox corpses over the internet and she wore them as pets she said she liked my art which consisted of cartoon animals howling in speech bubbles that read OH GREAT YOSEMITE!!!! naturally she asked me to immortalise her, to capture her in her essence. she wanted me to draw her as a horny red vixen with massive tits. i did, and she carried on being my friend, but the daily flash of blue-jay cock stirred a cauldron of shame, these were heavy paw prints in an otherwise untouched fold of desert. during this time, new measures were imposed to protect underage users from dolphin gang bangs and from people saying RANGER RICK WOULD GET IT!!!!! unsupervised, a nonplussed security warning read 

are you over 18?

i always clicked yes, we all always clicked yes, we always jumped over the fence marked private. after a time it was easy to forget that somewhere out there an American nature poet drank milk directly from a cat’s tit, or that the mashed bodies of raccoons were doing the rounds on Taxidermy Twitter, threads longer than entrails