Little Snowy Owl

The only thing that I can remember is that I didn’t like being a child. How do I know that? From endless associations [what do you mean by that? She says she can't remember anything about her childhood]. Besides, I didn’t really grow up. I don’t know who my parents were, and I don’t know where I grew up either. I only remember the smell of gasoline and tree sap. That’s where my memory ends. I don’t know where I came from. I don’t have a name. In the park, the call me “little one” or “the owl” because of the charm I wear. I don’t know how I got it, but I like imagining how I did.

In the park, my job is to collect clothes. They gave me the job because they said that I have “an eye for it”. They made fun of me because I only have one eye, I cover the other one with a patch. I really like my patch, I think it gives me character.

I heard that the ability to see what humans can't see made the owl a symbol of forekowledge. Owls have always represented the unconscoius, and people blessed with her powers can find what is hidden inside of them and others very easily.

Do I have magic powers? I like to think so, but I’m not sure. I’m a lucky because I don’t feel stress. The owl is also a symbol of sadness, and mysterious dark forces. It’s a winter bird, so if I am not an owl then I would like to be one. I couldn’t be a nightingale, a cuckoo, a woodpecker, a sparrow, and most definitely I couldn’t be a magpie.

They say the snowy owl is a big risk-taker. Unlike other owls, she’s easily spotted. She never looks for a place to hide, and just like me, she’s okay with the cold.

This is the coldest winter in New York, but I am tough. I hope that this winter I will learn how to read, that’s why I hang around the Brooklyn Public Library. I ask people to read to me about owls. The snowy owl is my favorite. It’s the only thing left from my past life. Besides, it’s warm in the library.

Today I found a bunch of single gloves withouto any matches. Also a jacket, a coat, and fur, thank God I have more money now. When I have money I go to the movies and to the bookstore on 7th Avenue, they have a cat there and strangely familiar salamanders in the summer. Nannies sit in the big chairs and read stories to the kids. I really like going there, sometimes I buy a book. I choose them by their covers. I know that there’s a saying not to judge a book by the cover, but at this point I have no choice. But I do think people judge me by my looks. I’m pretty and slim, and because of that I’m not judged as harshly as other people are. I never tell anyone that I live in the park, not because I’m ashamed, just because they always go out of their way to try to help me.

Old homeless folks and people who stink have it the hardest. But I understand them, I understand that they’re afraid of water. I hold my breath when I talk to them. I give them blankets, sleeping bags and clothes that I’ve found, trying to convince them to get rid of their old clothes. Not everyone decided to move to a shelter for the winter. In the summer the park is flooded with us. A lot of us speak Spanish, and we try to learn each other’s languages. It’s going pretty good. I don’t know how long I’ve been in New York, and I’m not even sure if I was born in America. I could be, I’m fluent in English. Even though I like fantasizing I’m from someplace else, where snowy owls live, like Canada, Russia or Antarctica. It’s daylight all the time in those places. It must be amazing.

The owl can hunt for 24 hours a day just like me. I find a lot of things at night. People drape clothes over the railing, put their shoes out on the stoop, and you have to be fast. Sometimes I find frozen gloves. I don’t like to push a cart around, so I put on everything I find . I learned to figure out if the clothes are bedbug free. This week I found a handmade poncho from Ecuador and a purple hat that matches my purple hoodie. I really like the hoodie- I fished for it in Chelsea, I don’t go to Manhattan much. I mostly look for stuff around the Brooklyn Library, Prospect Heights and Park Slope. This is where I hunt for people as well. I sit in the Brooklyn Commune or Tea Lounge to drink something warm, and most of the time I meet someone. I enjoy talking to younger people the most. I’m young myself- I couldn’t be more than 20.

Everybody in the park is too old. They say the older homeless folks have failed in life. Someone like me, they say I’m down on my luck. I’m white, I speak English and everyone says that sooner or later I’ll be back contributing to society. It’s just that I like my park family, I wouldn’t want to live by

myself. Sometimes I dream about my own place- a bathroom, a lamp, a sink, a toilet, a stove and a big closet. I look into other people’s apartments to see how they live. If I had my dream apartment, I think I’d probably be there once a week. I’m not meant to live in an enclosed space.

Besides, I don’t have ID - I can’t have a job or rent a place.

I’ve thought about babysitting or dogwalking but I’m afraid it’s going to be obvious I don’t remember who I am, I can't read and I’ll be taken away from the park.

I’m trying to learn how to read so I can go to school and support myself. My passion is theater, I would like to be an actress or costume designer, or any kind of designer. People tell me I have a gift at combining different elements. They also call me ‘a quiet little owl who loves to play with words.’ '

I think words are the most interesting things in the world. I’m fascinated with languages- there are so many words that mean the same thing but look different in different languages. I know there are different alphabets – like in Russian or Chinese. I found out that in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the owl means night, cold, passive, death. She belongs to the kingdom of the god Ra. Floating through the night on a boat under the River Nile from west to east. It sounds just like a song.

They laugh at me in the park because I spend so much time making words out of branches and twigs, this is the way I learn. Calligraphy is the most beautiful thing in the world, right after the sunrise. I often transcribe books. Recently I transcribed “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy. First I transcribed the English translation, followed by the original Russian. It was recommended to me by a very nice old lady, she said it’s a very wise book and it reminds her of when she was young in Europe. I don’t know if I’ve ever been to Europe, but I would really like to visit, it has to be an amazing place since they

apparently have really nice people living there. The older woman, Elena, read the whole book to me. We met every day at 10 AM for the entire month at The Brooklyn Library.

The sentence that I remembered the most was that the biggest mistake people make is to imagine happiness is when people get everything they want and need. After this sentence, Elena stopped reading and wiped a few tears from her cheeks. And there was one more moment when a paragraph stopped her. She then looked at me and said, “Child, it’s about you.” “It was as if her soul was overflowing from a spark in her eye, a smile, almost like it was against her will.” I smiled because I like getting compliments. I wanted to tell her that I only have one eye, but instead I bit my tongue and held her hand. Elena lives in a beautiful house right next to the library. She is very lonely, I wish that she would live with us in the park but I’m embarrassed to ask. Besides, she might be too old to change.

Everything started with me finding the gloves. I saw them everywhere, and that bothered me. Lonely, not part of a pair, frozen. It turns out that if I get enough of them, it’s not that hard to pair them together. Sometimes there are some that don’t match at all, they stand out totally, I love them and feel sorry for them the most, I alter them and I sew colorful patterns, I’m trying to match them together. I feel that being an outsider is not so good for them. Being an outsider is a kind of rejection, loneliness and

sadness. Everyone says that I love people: that’s why it’s going so good for me. I’m driven by a need to give these recycled gloves to others to keep them warm. I wonder about the gloves that are alone, somewhere on the bottom of someone’s closet, hoping that one day they’ll find their match. The rest of them are probably in the garbage.

After all, I had that kind of second life. I’m recycled. I got a second life, even though I don’t remember the first, I don’t know who my parents were, whether they are still looking for me, I don’t know whether I have any brothers or sisters, whether there’s anyone missing me. Sometimes I think of going to a TV station, and showing my face, maybe someone finds me. But I’m scared to be found by the wrong people, I like my life, I don’t want somebody to decide for me. I don’t miss anyone, it makes me feel sorry to think that I might have a younger sister or a brother who miss me now, but I suspect I am an only child. At the park they say that I have the personality of an only child.

It’s a pity I don’t know the date I was born. I’d like to know how old I am, and even more, what my zodiac sign is. Horoscopes fascinate me. I chose Aquarius for myself, because Aquarius was born in the winter, and I definitely like winter the most. Or maybe Capricorn? Every day I ask somebody to read my horoscope. When I’ve learned to read, I’ll read every morning. I’d like to learn the Internet, too. I heard there was a lot of horoscopes there. My best friend told me that.

He’s the only one at the park with a big-screen phone, where you can read horoscopes and watch movies and music videos. I love it when he comes to the park, but he doesn’t come very that much, because he has a real job – collecting glasses at night in bars, and in the daytime he helps at the construction site. He usually sleeps in the subway, only sometimes, when he loses a job, he stays with us a little longer. If I ever loved someone in a romantic way, it would be him only.

Rasta understands me best, and he always tries to help me. He is like a brother to me, everybody says we’re alike. He doesn’t like to talk much, he’s afraid of being accused of incest. He explained that to me, but I don’t really know what incest is.

Rasta won’t let me sleep with other men, he only lets me sleep with women. He says that sharing

your body is the best gift you can give another person and that you can do it only with somebody you love. When I say I love everybody, he strokes my hand and smiles nervously. “Little owl, little owl,” he says. “My little one.” It was him who said I must be an only child like him, that people find each other, but that you can't really know another person.

Lately I’ve been thinking about childhood, at the park, eveb though it’s wintertime, it smells like tree sap, it’s the trees crying when they’re being trimmed. I’d like to knit warm gloves to cover where the branches got cut off, but I don’t have enough yarn or time, I have to take care of the park people and the birds and I need time to learn how to read, do calligraphy and theater. It’s such a shame there are no nights in New York when the sun doesn't go down, that’d make things much easier for me. I often meet fascinating people, and we talk at night. This week on a park bench I met an unemployed man from Philadelphia, we talked fir hours about his life, his plans for the future, about money.

People talk a lot about money and they complain a lot about their health. And those who are in good health and have money complain about love, like that man from Boston I met in a bar – he knew a lot about the theater, traveled all around the world, and stikk he was very lonely. I wanted to give myself to him out of pity, but I was afraid that would have made Rasta angry

They say I have no fear, that I’m very courageous and have a blind faith in people. Recently, while walking back to the park at night, I saw a big pool of blood at the subway station. I’ve been having nightmares ever since. Blood on white tiles, an ambulance in front of the station, they didn’t make it in time. The body covered with a white sheet. I’m not afraid of dying, but I got scared at the sight of blood contrasting with the tiles, how much there was and the shapes it made. At the park I see animal blood, but it’s not the same thing. Lately I’ve been having dreams about eggshells, how they make a powder when I pour water over them, I also dream about scorpions, they sting me. Those dreams scare ne, I wake up in the night and scream: “Rasta!” He says the blood must’ve been there earlier, that I must’ve seen it somewhere and that I came from there with a premonition – and maybe that’s why I don’t want to go back. Rasta says that I have intuition, and that I’m smart in a stupid way.

I asked him about my religion. I’m not particularly religious, but I’m definitely spiritual, because I believe in the voices that I hear, I believe in quiet directions, I know something is watching over me. For me the owl is a great protector and teacher, teaches me concentration on the here and now, moving between worlds with total certainty about who she is and what she has to do. The owl taught me how to be myself and how to go into the dark without being scared, the owl taught me that clear-cut divisions

only make it hard to see things, because everything is equal, although not everything is good for us. I like it that they call her the eagle of the night. Most of the park people associate the night and darkness with something dangerous and unknown. The owl lives in it – it’s her world, which she rules and which she roams without being afraid. When she’s hunting, she's on patrol, just like I patrol my part of Brooklyn every day. I don’t understand why the owl’s hooting should scare people. I heard that the Indian eagle-owl hoots like a moaning woman, and sometimes they make blood-curdling screeches. The owl moves noiselessly, sliding on the wind, looking for wind currents, I admire her soft velvety feathers.

According to Indians from the Northwest the owls helped the shamans connect with the spirits of the dead, to see in the dark and to find lost objects. For some Native American tribes owl feathers

have magical properties. I like to think that’s where my charm comes from.

They say the fact that I don’t talk much is also very owl-like, because the owl is a symbol of protection, thoughtfulness, meditation and emptiness. I like that the barn owl have the heart-shaped face. Her name was "strix alba", strix refering to a mythical owl-like creater belived to feed on humans but from onomatopoeic antcient Greek she is a "white owl". The owl is also a symbol of loneliness, associated with ruins – abandoned and uninhabitable places. I’m also interested in long theater rehearsals, a show which can’t get staged despite a lot of preparation, just like how we prepare ourselves to go on stage, but unfortunately the show gets cancelled. I think that in my past life I could read, I feel bad when I think about that wasted work. I know that the show won’t go on. It’s a show in my head. I’m happy to be on stage, acting. So many rehearsals behind me. Rehearsals are pointless. Life can’t be a rehearsal. When I watch men on stage I know how they make love, I can tell if they’re good in bed. I wonder what the audience would make of me. Quick, strong, pretty? Or would they quietly sing, like the park people do, “Quiet little owl, who loves to play with words”?