Red Bird

I loved a woman once, a long time ago. She kept a red parrot as a pet. She called him Red Bird, and he was a raucous, noisy, talkative creature. A great, wild thing, he lived siloed in a wire bullet cage four feet tall by three feet round.

Red Bird never liked me much. When I'd come around, he'd voice my lover's sex sounds with partners past, as if to remind me I wasn't the first wounded stray she'd taken in. I knew her story before I ever crossed her threshold, so I never held it against him. The sounds she made during sex with me were better than Red Bird's interpretations, anyway, so no harm, no foul. I felt sorry for Red Bird, really, trapped as he was. He was little more than an adornment, like a piece of rare furniture, displayed to make her look good, stimulate conversation, delight her dinner guests.

I wondered sometimes if Red Bird had memories of flying. Did he know what it was like to be free, feel the wind in his face, instincts flowing through his bird soul and out through his wingtips? Would he even comprehend the blue expanse above him? Would it just be too much for his Red Bird mind to process?

In the 14 months, 27 days, and 16 hours we were together, my lover and I never talked about Red Bird, the injustice of keeping a flying creature in a cage. Frankly, I didn't want to do anything to interrupt the morning and evening flow of our own sex sounds, and I enjoyed the way her Light reflected on me. I realized later she was my adornment, my rare furniture. And hell, maybe Red Bird liked it there, had convolutedly convinced himself in his Red Bird mind that food without effort and safety behind bars were worth him being an exhibit. I realized later I'd made those same kinds of calculations, and I was content -- until the lover turned me loose, and I had to learn to fly again.

It was a crushing moment, and the loss washed over me like a flash flood through an old arroyo, sweeping me off balance and throwing upside down everything I'd constructed in my mind about who I was and what I felt and what I thought I deserved, casting it into a maelstrom of detritus and pain and agony. An indelible moment upon which, for a long while, I registered time: before, and after. Pre and post.

It was a gift, really. Cloaked in sorrow to be sure, but a gift nonetheless, revealed as such only with time. A door to a cage of my own construction had been opened, and I was forced out into the wild again, confronting a freedom I'd forgotten, finding the broken pieces of my Self among the flotsam.

And I learned to fly once more, tentatively, and still wounded for long thereafter. Only much, much later did I realize the hard realities of my choices, digging through the morass of my own history to see the patterns I'd created, a wounded boy desperately looking for what we all crave: love and acceptance. Trapped like Red Bird in a cage composed of mirage and the smoky imagery of what I thought was important and valuable, I was happy with the illusion. Until I learned what an illusion it was.

I hope Red Bird found his way home, saw the sky flowing to the horizon. I hope he felt the wind lifting his wings to parts unknown, finally able to do what birds do best, in this world or the next.

In this world, or the next.