There's a stubborn crow where my heart should be

I recently finished reading It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne De Marcken. The narrator is a Zombie who, early in the story, picks up a dead crow and carries it in her chest. She asks it questions sometimes. It answers in bursts of 3 or 4 words. Quoth the crow:

Tooth. Smoke. Switch.

The book is nothing if not a series of images. The image of an opinionated crow living in your chest speaks to me, it makes me think of living with mental illness. I have things I want, I want to change. But my heart isn't in it sometimes. Maybe it's easier to think of it as a crow, stubborn in it's desires, animalistic in it's need for safety. I want to go out, go someplace unfamiliar. Says the crow:

East. Van. Canyon.

And I am reminded of everything that can go wrong. As I read the book, I wanted to stop and reflect on what the crow says, figure out if the words maybe mean something to the narrator that they don't mean to the reader. Of my own crow, the cunning, abused coward in my chest, I ask permission to be vulnerable, to be open to the people I want to love, and it replies

Ship. Canal. Bridge.

and uses words for the images trapped in scars.

I read, also, "Find what you love and let it kill you," twice-over; once in winter's reflection on it, and once as an article that is linked from that reflection:

It sparks in me a desire for a life's work. I don't want to be James Rhodes; I don't want to abandon everything, but I have a desire for something to grab me and not let go. I've wanted to continue writing music; I want to make something that gives voice to conjoined experience of gender and disability, the terror of knowing I'm not growing into who I want to become. The only path to that realization is through; is trying; is writing again and again until the words sound right.

Shell. Yellow. Brothers.

and instead I open my computer.

Shiny. Safe. Numb.