Through avian eyes

In a time not far ago, there was a raven that didnt know it could fly.
The raven simply waddled past the strange creatures who stood in its way, aiming for a goal that they hadn't yet thought of.
The raven was a strange one. It didn't understand the bipedal creatures that lived around it. It didn't understand what they were.

The raven that simply glided by observing these unique and wonderful creatures, mimicking their every move. When the raven saw how they talked, it mimicked. When they began to walk, the raven tried it too.
Yet the raven couldn't understand when they saw what the raven thought was normal, with disgusting eyes.

The raven tried their hardest, yet never felt it could blend in with them. No matter how much it studied them, no matter how much it marveled at these titans, no matter how much it looked up to be like them, the raven never truly could be like them.
For the raven was of hollow bones and feather, of wings and squawking cries.
No, the raven couldn't truly be like the humans it had watched.

The raven cried when the others cried, and laughed when the others laughed, yet never was the raven human. It tried to love when others said that was the norm, yet never understood their hunger. Thus, in its final act of desperation, the raven cast itself into the forest and clawed of its feathers and bent its wings, casting away its unknown freedom of flight. The raven reshaped itself to be like the creatures it had studied, watched, and mimicked.
Yet even when it walked out, the forest changed. Even when the raven now looked and acted like the others around it, they still watched the world through its avian eyes.

The raven, now aware of its failing performance, felt the urge to grow back its wings, yet it never could. For the forest had taken, and the forest would not return it.
So as the raven felt like its charade was crumbling and sank to depravity, they made one last gambit.
The raven, who had played an act all its life, finally understood its role. It understood the form it had taken. It understood what name they had forged in the deep forest.

Thus, the raven took one last breath before throwing itself into the burning stage of the circus they themselves had made. No longer acting, no longer pretending to be something they weren't, no longer a raven.
For the audience would witness them.
Now they would laugh along with them, now they would welcome their clown.