The Birds Before Me

Lately, I’ve been thinking of the birds often. When slumber won’t flood my body, and cradle me like my mother once did, I toss around, I count my breathhold and the sheep don’t come. Still, this pumping vessel is slowed and the courses are taken with leisure. Those birds, what do they mean? I am ached and I am exhausted, yet I lay in wake and pretend that I am asleep. What are these birds? They fly and they cry and they sing me this song in the middle of the night and again in the morning and when the skies are still. They sing to each other and I still thank them for letting me listen to their birdsong.  

There they go; they land on some park bench in front of me, enticed by crumbs of some pastry I’m consuming. Perhaps this feels teasing to them—they wait for the fall of crumble to reach my feet, for them to snatch between their pointed beaks. I wish they didn’t eat from the ground, though I know they don’t know, and they aren’t bothered. They are animals. They are birds. Yet, I would like to feed them with the delicacy that I would make my hands, gentle to hold their sustenance. I could hold those seeds or crumbs or bugs and feed them from my fleshed plate, open and accepting of their pecks. They are birds. 

I’d never been too fond of birds. I had this dream as a child where I wore a grey coat. I walked beneath this tree and toward an old rickety house. I didn’t live there in the woken world and I don’t know if I’ll ever find out whose house that was if not just that one built and rattled and aged in my dreamt life. I ran from that ancient oak towards the familiar house. The birds flew at me. Pulling my great coat over my head, I ran. I ran and they didn’t stop, flying at me with the rage and the fury that I dreamt of. This was so long ago, it’s hard to remember what plagued me with the anxiety and anger of my own that was held within my body that caused the flux of birds to send themselves upon me. What did I do wrong to these birds? Why did they pummel me with their fist-like bodies? What did they want from me? More importantly, what did they need from me? What did they need to tell me? I felt those birds bullet themselves at my hands exposed, unprotected by that winter coat. I picked up my pace, but still could not outrun them. Terribly frightened, I could only feel them becoming more rapid, flocking into a larger group, hurriedly flying at me. 

And then, I woke. And then, my temporary fear began.

There was some day, during the period of my life when my father was teaching me how to drive. This was at the beginning; no driving on the main roads for me at my tiny age of thirteen. My father drove us to the ranch, twenty minutes away from the home where my childhood began and ended. That ranch will eventually be mine someday, when my father is no more. I looked at the rising sun and had thoughtless moments. He started teaching me how to drive around the same time I was struggling to understand the way my mind worked. We weren’t terribly removed from each other, but there were two planes in which we existed. I was awoken from the dreaminess of the rising sun and my father by the slamming of a buzzard into the driver’s mirror. I remember how the mirror closed in on itself because of the force of that bird—the mirror of my father’s tan Chevrolet Colorado. I remember seeing that damned buzzard lose its flight and I didn’t see where it landed but I know that it was brought to the ground. The sickening thud gave us both a fright. The silence was brief, but alas that startle was then settled by mutual laughs. Those laughs became because of the startle. My father unrolled the window and pushed his mirror back. We kept driving. 

Upon arrival to some dirt road, Dad and I traded places, from seat to seat. I recall the eagerness in which I wanted to learn how to drive. I wanted a vehicle to yield. I wanted a purpose. “Adjust your seat forward. Can you see in the mirrors? Move them around and I’ll move them back when I drive home,” my father would say like a mantra. This is how I knew the drive would begin. The eagerness woke me early on Saturday mornings, where I'd jump into my oldest clothes and shoes and rise with that sun. Once I started learning how to drive properly, I’d abandoned my usual routine:  rise with the sun, run off to sit in my father’s passenger seat, and head out to that dirt road. Instead of trading places at the beginning of asphalt meets caliche, he’d pull over. I’d get out and then he would keep driving. I’d run my way to the entrance. I would run. And run. And run. And at some point, without fail, I’d get that high of a runner, the one where the mind and body would become unyoked from one another. I cannot feel my body. This brings me peace where I would spend most of my time feeling everything, all too frequently and all too often. There is nothing but rhythm. Time. Beat upon beat of tread. The beat made by my body and dirt and that is all there ever needed to be. I need not of another sound, though I can hear the wind like a voice about me. This beat I cannot touch, but I can feel in this state of dream-likeliness. Sometimes, the body feels of dissonance, but not then, when the body is ridden of pain, excruciation ceases. I cannot feel the ground beneath me; I cannot feel the impact of the ground on my stomping soles, that impact spreading into my ankles and following, jolting up my shins and into my knees that cartilage connecting my thighs and into pelvic holds, and the insides of me being shaken up and down, being pumped and driven forth by arms that churn like turbines. The water flows from my pores similarly as some pump harnesses energy. I cannot feel the burning breath that screams to be taken and given from my nostrils unto throat down to lungs, and out the way that the ghost of it came. I cannot feel the sun that slaps itself against my skin. I hear the rhythmic carry of myself and the ground, the simple song we make. I don’t lose the tempo. Then, I become birdly.

I didn’t run that day. 

On that same day, we found ourselves turned around and heading back home. The heat of the sun was coming out, brighter than before. There is that heat of the morning, when the sun really comes out, and it’s still damp from the eve before, and that sweat. The air turns to steam about us. That sweat just pools on your skin until it develops into a bead a creates a trail on the body. That cycle of waterwork that makes you sticken. I drove that cycle from the end of asphalt until the asphalt began again. And then, it’s time to leave. I miss that road. I miss the run. I miss the ache.

In the passenger seat I stared out at the ending of land empty, and the beginning of land cleared where the windmills sat, planted with the wings gliding through the air. There is that barrier. Another beat, the slicing of wind, keeping time together they follow each other. Those steel beasts changed migratory survival rates of the birds nomadic. How cruel. Machine versus nature. We harvest the wind and kill the birds. 

Abruptly, I was ripped from thoughts I didn’t realize I was having until much later in life. The cracking of the windshield, a revolting sound, and the image of the being, all startled me. The cause of the noise cracked the windshield on the passenger side of the Chevy Colorado. That day it felt like if the wind blew hard enough something else would go wrong in that truck. Yet, there it was, twofold. The end of these large birds happened upon my father and me. I sat in that truck and I witnessed the beginning of death, and the ending of the birds before me. 

My father exclaimed something about the strangities that continued to occur. “Where are these birds going?” I laughed. We both laughed. I think the jolt caused half of that laugh for the both of us. The other half, well, perhaps it developed from the absurdity. We’ve killed two birds with one stone, but in this case, the stone is a tan Chevrolet Colorado. Did that saying clarify if the birds were killed at the same time? I reckon it doesn’t matter that much anyway—two birds are and remain slain by a violent and fatal stone. 

I am not afraid anymore—well, at least not in the same way as before. We maintain a respectable distance and a mutual understanding, those birds and I. Although, I will say they have remained persistent. They want and they sing and I listen and I appreciate and I sing back. They sit outside my window and perch themselves unwavering on my balcony. They know no fear of me, though I’ve not given them a reason to fear.

I recall hoping that the birds died quickly, as there was no coup de grâce. I hope when I meet my demise, it too, is instant.