There once lived a mouse. Who thought his whole life was embarrassing. He remembered always thinking, ‘do I really deserve to be a mouse? I feel more like a flea. Other mice played their mouse games as naturally and tirelessly as they did, while this mouse would watch them with awe and respect. At night, they would sleep without a worry while this mouse stayed up for hours with a gnawing sense that something was wrong.
One day, this mouse’s mother took him to see a mouse doctor, who told him there was something wrong with his mouse brain, and a little bit of a certain kind of cheese, once a day every morning, would fix it. The mouse took one bite of the cheese the mouse doctor gave him and he felt sick. He never ate that rotten cheese again.
The mouse decided to ignore the way he felt, because none of it made any sense to him, and eventually it worked. The young mouse felt better, as gradually, he became a mouse grownup. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better. But the mouse was alone and he didn’t know why. He would sometimes write short essays where he compared himself to a flea, and he thought maybe that was why. What mouse would want to read crap like that? He wanted to write about normal happier mouse things, but it seemed that anytime he tried, that same old flea crap would come out.
So the mouse who wrote about being a flea would keep writing, and writing, until one day, the flea community took notice. They thought, ‘my god, what flea was this who wrote these beautiful words about being a flea?!’ and when they found out that who they thought was a flea was actually a mouse, they couldn’t believe it. Some fleas abhorred it, while other, more progressive fleas praised it. Finally, the mouse had an audience and was generally well respected. While at the same time he realized, that if he ever actually met one of his flea fans, they would attach themselves to him and he would itch voraciously for weeks, so he tried to avoid this at all costs.
Soon the mouse had so much cheese, fresh delicious and fulfilling cheeses of all kinds, and he owed it all to the journey of not knowing that for so long, inside his little mouse body, lied the persevering heart of a flea. If things hadn’t been so strange for him, he would have never even written about it. He would have been lost in the rat race, never knowing who he truly was, and forever hurting. Now he knew who he was and he could live true. But most importantly, he could continue to explore the many infinite shapes that the mouse heart can take.