letter to a little bird
Hello, little bird. Hello, little brown-feathered body, bespeckled tan and white against the pebbled gray concrete. A broken wing brought you down, perhaps, or a pane of glass that you believed was open air. I can’t look at you closely enough to tell; you’re too still. I have never been this close to a living bird, and therefore all I can see now is your stillness, your death.
You look like a house sparrow, according to my memory of the glossy pictures in the birdwatching books I read as a child. Your kind mate for life. And so you must know what it is like to stay with someone for years on end, to plan to stay with them forever. Still, I can’t help but wonder if you have ever felt more alone.
You are two pieces now, little bird. Your body I see in front of me on the pavement, blurry to eyes that need glasses but refuse to wear them. But it is the other piece of you that I speak to now, the piece that would be unclear even with perfect vision, the vitality that lifted this body to flight and lit those black eyes with the understanding of a world that to you seemed simple and predictable. Silently, I ask you if you can feel pain anymore, in that vulnerable, intangible piece of your being. I do not believe in souls, but even I can see that something vital was ripped away from you this day.
The ground beneath your body forms the ceiling of the print shop underground, the place where the words are born from the gaping maw of Laser-Jet, ink-monster printers and come tearing into the world in full color—royal blue and white and gold. There is a young woman who works there sometimes, barely out of girlhood with coffee-brown hair and almond eyes and a wide-open heart that she keeps secret inside her. She tends to the monsters, feeding them a steady diet of paper and ink, and when she finishes she walks out into the sun where today your body waits for her to mourn.
There will be a night, two years from now, when that woman will lie in bed with cell phone in hand and feel as though she stands on the land where the words go to die, because they burst up inside her and arrive stillborn in this world without a proper midwife to color them with the ardent hues of their lifeblood. She thinks of the man she left behind in the west, three thousand miles away who didn’t give her a proper goodbye. She wants to tell him, Come here, I need you.
It would take so little effort to tap her fingers across the stygian void of the iPhone’s touchscreen, to bring those words also into blue-and-white being. But it feels too easy, and that frightens her. Frightens her because she knows that despite the ease of this medium, he will not put in the minimal effort to answer her message. He will see it, maybe even read it, but will put it aside for later because he does not believe it is his responsibility to play caretaker to a grown woman, even in the moments she feels most small—and that knowledge will break her heart as surely as something in this world has broken your feathered wings. You would not have flown into that windowpane if you had seen the glass there, would you, little bird? But that is exactly what she is considering.
It was not difficult for you to fly, was it? Not once you learned. And she has learned all too well how to tell this man that she needs him, but she has not yet learned how to survive the drop when those words inevitably fall short. So she lays in bed as you lay on this sidewalk, both of you pinioned by forces outside your control and internally tormented as you struggle to blink the darkness away. For you: the darkness of your closing eyes and weakening whisper of a heartbeat. And for her: the darkness of holding back from calling to him, of waiting for him to call to her instead and knowing he will not do so when she most needs him.
And she wonders what it would be like, to rip open her chest with her bare hands, with fingers that end in pink half-moon nails that have never hurt anyone, never, and to say to him, here. Here is my heart. Take it. To let him steal away that fleshy red knot that beats life through her veins and to know as she does so that she will never ask for it back. Because in return he has given her a necklace with their favorite words carved into the metal, a mottled gray hoodie that clings to the memory of his scent—and lastly, a favorite record that she played once, furtively, on her father’s turntable when her parents were out of town, keeping that gift hidden from them because she knows they would not approve of this man and the way he treats her.
I wonder, little bird, did you ever sing? The songs of sparrows are sung most often by the males, declarations that they have a home and a nest and are settled in place. But the females sing too, I hear. They sing when they are lonely, when they are without a mate and looking for someone to fill the void.
Were you ever lonely, little bird? Did he ever leave you? I imagine you sat in the nest you’d made together, tucked away in some secret corner of your world, filled with dried grasses to give it structure and foraged feathers to keep it warm. Perhaps you filled it with scraps of paper as well, scavenged from the torn posters or discarded newspapers that ride the whims of the wind—paper inscribed with words down in the basement where beauty is born from the rattling mouths of monsters. Were those words enough to keep you warm when he left? Did you find some numinous comfort in the glyphs written in a language you cannot comprehend but which contain the same breed of loss and longing that you weave into your song? And if you could read those words, you might find it strange and magical how two lovely, lonely songs found each other in this way.
She does not sing or call out to him through the night. She tells herself that he has given her more than she could ever expect him to, but still she yearns to ask for more, because his name has become a lucky charm that she whispers in the night when she feels scared and alone, when she wakes still half caught in a nightmare, when the part of her brain that insists always that she feel anxious and unloved needs something to hold onto as it stutters the same thoughts again and again as her breath shutters in and out of her chest. But she refuses to show him this last symptom of her emotional frailty, because some subconscious and shrewd piece of her mind realizes that he has nothing to give her that could fill this void. He builds walls within his heart to keep her from reaching in. He will give her no vital part of himself to replace the heart that she has given him, but he will take and take all her adoration as if he deserves it anyway. It is this knowledge, buried deep within, that prevent her from telling him how fragile she is, even though she has told him the tales of all the other consequences of her brain and still has not run away.
That is why she loves him, little bird. It has been two years and three summers by his side and she loves him because he knows her, sees her, and even the ugliest pieces do not repulse him. When he comes back to her after his weekend away, after the night she longed to hear his voice but could not use her own to reach out, she tells him the truth at last. She explains to him her anxiety and the way it colors her view of the world with the fear of being weighed and found wanting. She explains to him, for he was not there (of course he was not there), how she found herself curled on the floor of her dormitory room one night, struggling to breathe and refusing to let herself seek the comfort of a mattress, for her bedframe was tall and she recognized the temptation of even a small height from which to fall.
When she is done with her explanations, he simply asks her, What can I do to help? No hesitation. No fear. No decision that she is too much work for too little reward. Only a promise to call more often, for she believes that will fight the loneliness and self-loathing away. And there is something soft in that promise, something like the downy feathers that line your nest. She adores him for it, adores him for the pictures he sends her throughout the following week of his smiling face. And for a while she can ignore the fact that there is nothing solid there to give the softness any structure.
But he does not warn her when he is too busy to call. He does not tell her he loves her, even though the heart of hers that he holds sacred needs to hear the words. He cannot be the person she returns to when she flies back from the frigid lands in the north, even though his embrace makes her feel like melting—she is butter dripping across his body and in the moment he cannot get enough of the way she tastes, but the aftermath of her presence is an oily, persistent guilt—and he is the very first person she tells when the final chords of an Eagles song play and the airplane’s wheels touch the dull brown soil of her home. He treats her like a bad habit whose pattern he cannot break, hiding her from his family when he takes her out at night, kissing her in the back of his car at a drive-in movie theater when he knows all eyes will be on the screen and not on his touch. Her love is secret and shameful to him, and he shows that shame enough that she begins to feel guilty too.
He cannot be her person, not truly—despite the beloved record and the hoodie and the metal chain around her neck that she tucks into her shirt every morning when she awakes and climbs out of bed feeling as though that necklace marks her as belonging in this world. Long distance means filling the empty space of his hoodie with thoughts of him, building them up until the battered gray cloth feels full, until the man she wants him to be becomes the man she thinks he is. She speaks to that imagined version of him, and presents a false reflection of herself to him in turn, an image of a girl who is not, in fact, hurting and scared and needing him there. And unable to reach out for his help even though she has built him up in her head as the only one who could love her through this. But loving a hoodie means there is no soul within to wrap its arms around her, and so she threads her body through it herself and pretends her heartbeat is his.
And she shuts out the word toxic when it rings through her mind, its melody an unwelcome addition to the song of her love for him. She refuses to give that word voice, and instead the silence of its absence makes her music hollow and sad, the sound of your soul keening for its loss and longing for its mate. But the distance is too great for any true affection. But the betrayal of such a label as toxic will never leave her mouth, so instead she keeps it locked within her and lets it pool like rainwater within her heart, collecting there and building up and eroding the once-solid flesh within, and one day it will reach capacity and what will she do when it does, what form of denial will she take then to protect herself against the poison her love slowly leeches into her body?
She tries to fill that space instead with the insistence that he is a good man, her faith in him thrumming deep in her chest along with that naive, innocent heart. She thinks of their first kiss, how she used to be unsure who had started it, back then in the darkness outside of a record store on University Avenue, but how she knows now that it could not have been him, for he never pushed her in any way, always pulled back to give her space whenever it confused and startled her to want him when such a separation loomed in their future. How he told her she was amazing and intelligent and gorgeous and had so much to offer—tried to chip away at her shell she would feel brave enough to step out into the world, to make friends and go to parties and give her opinion decidedly and without disclaimers. How he pulled away when she told him I love you for the first time and replied that of course he loved her back but she should save herself for someone who could be hers to keep, because she was forever leaving and he already entrenched in place. How she said it again in a text goodnight a few weeks later and in the morning he asked her to never say it again.
I wonder, little bird, does your mate mourn your loss? Does he know yet that you are gone? Your children must have left the nest by now, or you would not be out here flying, away from them; they will not miss you. It would be just the two of you—and just the one, now. Will he miss you when he realizes that you are now destined not to return to him? Will he sing for you, call out on the off chance that your soul will hear it and come home? Or will his song be meant for the ears of another, someone new with whom to build a nest?
Even if it is, you hope that he will be happy with her. That she will ruffle his feathers and smooth them down in equal measure. That he will craft a new love song just for her, the notes of it unique and without a trace of the melancholy of your absence. That he will find a secret pocket of his heart that opens just for her, and that it will allow him to sing the three words he only once gave to you. You hope he will be happy. You know he deserves to be.
Because he is a good man, little bird.