To Catch a Falling Bird





The day Mira’s world fell apart, the sky remained painfully blue, the sun unbothered, and the birds still sang — except for one. A sparrow. Small, fragile, flailing against the wind. She watched it from her hospital window, wings beating in vain before it dropped from the sky like a stone. Just like her life had — without warning, without mercy.

It had only been three days since the accident. Her husband, Aarav, was gone. A drunk driver had changed everything in one flash of metal and silence. She had survived. He had not.

The world outside kept moving, but Mira stayed still — cocooned in grief, wrapped in a numbness that neither doctors nor visitors could break. She remembered little from the funeral. White flowers. Silent tears. People speaking in whispers like grief was a crime too heavy to mention aloud.

That morning, she was discharged. Her sister came to take her home, but home was a word that no longer meant comfort. It meant absence. Still, she followed the motions. Walk. Eat. Sleep. Breathe. Repeat.

Weeks passed.

Mira would often sit by the window, looking at the old garden Aarav had planted when they bought the house. Every rosebush, every stray marigold held pieces of their story. But now the colors were dull, the petals burdened with silence.

And then, one day, she saw it again — the sparrow. Or maybe a sparrow. Injured. Its wing dragging uselessly behind as it hopped beneath the bougainvillea.

She watched it for hours, something stirring inside her. It tried to fly, failed, then tried again. A bird that should’ve been broken — but wasn’t.

Mira went outside for the first time in weeks. Slowly. She approached the sparrow with cautious hands. It didn’t run. It only looked up at her, breathing fast, eyes alive with something desperate and determined.

She named it Noor — meaning “light.”

She built Noor a little shelter in a shoebox and fed it soaked grains. Every day, she checked on it, talked to it in whispers, her voice shaky but growing steadier. Noor healed slowly. And strangely, so did Mira.

As she cared for the sparrow, she found herself returning to the world. Cooking again. Walking barefoot in the garden. Listening to old music. Aarav’s favorite playlist played once more — soft, aching melodies that used to fill their Sunday mornings.

One afternoon, Noor flapped both wings with renewed strength. Mira opened the box to set her free, but the bird didn’t fly away. Instead, it perched on Mira’s finger — light as memory, real as grief. Then, with a single leap, Noor soared into the sky.

Mira didn’t cry. She smiled.

The next morning, Mira dug up a small patch of earth in the garden and planted something new — a lavender bush. Aarav had once said that lavender smelled like peace. It bloomed slowly, but it bloomed.

She began to write again — something she hadn’t done in years. Little journal entries, poems, letters to Aarav. Words poured out like rain after a long drought.

One evening, as the sun dipped low and turned the garden golden, her neighbor’s little girl ran up to the gate. “Aunty Mira, why don’t you smile anymore?” she asked with innocent eyes.

Mira knelt down and brushed the child’s cheek. “Because I forgot how,” she replied softly. “But I’m learning again.”

That night, she wrote in her journal: “Hope is not loud. It doesn’t scream. It whispers. Sometimes, it has wings.”

The days no longer hurt as much. The memories, though still tender, became companions instead of wounds. Grief had not left — it never truly does — but it had softened, like waves that no longer crashed, only lapped gently against her soul.

Months later, a sparrow visited the garden again. She wasn’t sure if it was Noor. But as it perched on the same branch outside her window, Mira whispered to the wind, “Thank you.”

She had caught a falling sparrow once. But really, it had caught her.

🌸 Epilogue:

In the heart of a quiet garden, beneath lavender blooms and fading marigolds, a woman rebuilt herself — not all at once, but piece by piece. Through gentle acts, whispered prayers, and one small, determined sparrow, Mira found not what she lost — but what still lived inside her:

Fragile hope. Quiet strength. And the courage to rise again.