I am a bird
last night's journal entry
my heart feels heavy and so I write.
I guess I don’t really want to write about why my heart feels heavy because that will only make it weigh more.
So maybe I can pretend I am a bird. And I fly with my wings and feathers. And my hollow bones allow me to do this, to fly. I fly until I find a nice tree with a wonderfully comfortable branch to perch on. And so I perch. My little bird toes gripping around the branch like a baby grips her mother’s finger. And I am a bird and maybe I squawk and chirp and caw. And I get to be so very loud and no one even gets mad at me. Or maybe they do but I don’t know and I don’t care because I am a bird. And maybe I fly down from my perch to a nice garden. And I peck around the garden until I find the most glorious worm. So plump and pink. And I grab it with my beak and eat it whole. I let out a celebratory squawk because My Word! What a delicious treat! And then I flap my wings and I am flying again. I let the wind guide my wings and I see the whole neighborhood below me, but I am a bird and I don’t know words like ‘neighborhood’. All I know is to fly, fly, fly! And I fly and soar and fly some more. And when I get tired, perhaps I perch on a powerline. I do not know it is a powerline, to me it is a funny shaped tree branch, because I do not know about electricity because I am a bird. And I see the humans below me and they look funny. They don’t have any feathers and their beaks don’t look very useful for grabbing seeds in hard to reach places. I watch the humans from my powerline branch and another bird friend joins me. And we caw and squawk and chirp and make all the other bird noises. And we sit there. Perched on a powerline. Two birds. And then I fly away.
It sure would be nice to be a bird. Fly away from it all. Up in the sky, everything seems so small. And I feel small. And I really am quite small, in the grand scheme of it all.
A bird or a worm or a squirrel or even a sea sponge.
Maybe I could be a tree and I would have a very large canopy of branches that whomever was underneath me would feel my tender embrace.
I could be a hermit crab and I wouldn’t even mind if my shell didn’t fit quite right or if it wasn’t a shell at all and instead a piece of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I wouldn’t mind because I am a hermit crab and I wouldn’t really know the difference. Maybe I even like the way the soft, weathered plastic feels on my exoskeleton.
And maybe I am a spider and I have eight legs and I have never even had eight legs before, so I don’t really know what I am doing but I can walk on walls and spin beautiful, intricate webs, which is also where my dinner appears. And sometimes girl children scream when they see me and I get a little sad because I do not even want to harm them and really, I am much quite smaller than them, so if anyone should be screaming, it should be me. I am just a spider in the corner of the ceiling in your bedroom. And maybe I chose to live there in the corner of your bedroom because I like to watch you sleep. You look so beautiful, so peaceful. So much more than when you are awake. I see humans and I watch them and I see their pain and stress and hurt. And sometimes I think, Hey! Come on down to my web, I can share my fly with you and you can relax.
And maybe, I am none of these things and am instead a human woman who is just trying to find her place in the world. But does a bird or tree or hermit crab or spider feel the need to “find their place in the world”?? No! They just are! They just do. They just be. And maybe I can do the same.
I may not be able to fly or spin webs but I have a heart and a brain and working arms and legs and I can live! And I do it everyday! And maybe that is enough.
This piece was inspired by Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds. I have been devouring this book and am so inspired by the way she writes. These words came straight from my brain to my journal and have only been eversoslightly edited for you here. Take care of yourself.