Dear Little Bird

The bird landed on a Tuesday.

Elena stood there, gazing at it crouched next to her window, feathers rumpled, a smudge of dirt along its tiny beak. Rain pounded against the glass, streaking the world gray and blurry, but the bird did not move. It simply sat there — shivering, but whole.

She opened the window a crack. "Hey, little one."

The bird did not move. It blinked once, slowly, as if it were listening.

Elena did not know anything about birds. She passed her days in a fluorescent-lit office under unwritten law. She'd learned as a child to keep her head down, her voice soft, and take up little room. That's how she survived — by being unnoted, by not being heard too much, or felt too much.

But something in this bird stirred a dormant ache in her. She put a towel folded on the windowsill and filled a bottle cap with a handful of sunflower seeds.

The bird remained the next morning.

It was habit. Elena would leave a little food, a little water. The bird would stay. It never sang, never flew, only stared at her with eyes too human to be comfortable. She began to speak to it -- little things to begin with. Complaints about work, fragments of memory, old ambitions she had shelved like love letters she no longer remembered.

"I wanted to write," she'd said one night, sipping tea on the floor by the window. "Poems, stories, maybe even a book. But life. life had other plans."

The bird tilted its head.

"Ever think you missed something? Like you took the safe path, but lost fragments of yourself?"

It blinked slowly.

Elena laughed. "Yeah. What do you know about it?"

She did not expect an answer. But at that moment, the silence between them was a reflection. As if the bird was listening not with its ears, but with something more intelligent. Something older.

Weeks passed. The bird remained.

Elena began writing once more. At first, simply random thoughts in a journal. Then poems. Then short stories — things she had not had the nerve to write in years. Her words were messy, raw, honest. She published some online under a pseudonym. The responses were small but positive. She felt something she had not felt in years: alive.

One evening, she came home to find the bird gone.

She gazed out the tree outside, the garden below, even the roof. Nothing. A naked windowsill and a few feathers. She felt the loss like a gentle wind through her chest.

Strangely, she didn't weep.

She sat instead by the window and breathed softly, "Thank you."

The next morning, there was a letter on her desk. Not an email. Not a text. A letter, written out by hand, on paper pale as her belly, just: Dear Little Bird.

In her handwriting.

She unfolded it shaking.

Dear Little Bird

You stayed when I did not. You listened when the world was too much. You kept the pieces of me I thought I'd lost — the tender bits, the feral bits, the bits that still clung to something more.

You showed me that vulnerability is not weakness. That quiet can be strength. That flight doesn't always mean running away — sometimes it means coming home.

You were never just a bird. You were the voice I had silenced. The hope I had repressed. The dream I thought had died.

But here I am, writing again. Living again. Flying, clumsily. Again.

Thank you. For staying. For teaching me. For setting me free.

Love,

Elena

She returned the letter to its envelope and smiled.

The bird had vanished — but it had never actually been an ordinary bird. It had been her reflection, her memory, her younger self tapping softly against the windowpane, begging to be admitted once more.

From that moment on, Elena wrote every day. Her stories took flight. Some were gentle, some wild, but all hers. She no longer sang to the wind — she spoke, she sang, she flew.

And occasionally, in the stillness of morning, she would sense a faint flutter by the window and smile.

Dear little bird, she would whisper. We made it.

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