Scarlet Love

Scarlet Love

The rain danced on top the tin overhang. Ting. Ting. Ting. Muffled sounds of the street beckon through the apartment window. I have lived here for 40 years. She was just a young girl in love when I first perched her shoulder. Now she is there, in the chair with eyes that no longer can see my colors. Love has long gone but it’s absence has not taken the gentleness from her hand.

The noise from the street may deep into the apartment but it is quiet here. Looking around the apartment, a jungle of its own. Antiquities and dusty memories scattered throughout this place. A life well lived. She rocks most nights. She tells me stories of long ago as it it were the first time.

“You were lost and broken, just as I was,” she says.

Then shee again tells me I was always such a pretty bird.

“It was 1945. And I was very much in love,” her frail voice breaks.

She was a writer, off to explore the rainforest and research some of the most rare and unusual creatures it had in store.

They were newlyweds off on an adventurous honeymoon destined to return with fantastic stories and a sensational start to a new life.

“He was my life, just as you are now. I knew he would never leave me.”

The story goes that I was a tall, handsome and intelligent man. A poet. According to her, it was love at first sight that left them both blinded with love. Soon they married and bought two tickets to South America. They had so many plans.

“I never thought I would ever return home without him,” she cried.

“Then there was you, you returned to me and with me.”

She strokes my beak with her fingertip. Her feeble hand, aged with lines of time and loss is wrapped around my quick bearing heart.

As I look at her, she really is the only one for me. I am her love.

“Do you remember that day in the rainforest, Love?” she asks.

“Yes, Love” I implore her to continue.

She goes on with our story. The nights so dark, leaves adorned with eyes and the break of morning led to a symphony of the forest awakening. Days of skinny dipping and red wine spilling from happy glasses of a couples young love. The smell of birds of paradise and insects singing fill the air.

“But then you… you fell ill.”

Lying in the jungle, lovers holding hands. The huts walls adorned with drawings of creatures unknown. Pages and jars and books are filled with specimens encapsulating the jungle they loved.

“Your fever wouldn’t break.” she says.

She tells me the story again, as if I weren’t there. As if I wasn’t already watching them, fall in love, from my canopy under the stars.

“I saw you then and loved you still.” I croon to her.

She is like a delicate flower. Even past the lines of her face that tell a story of a live well lived, I see her beauty. It as as it always was. Something to see.

“As you took your last breath, I cried for your return. Just as my heart collapsed within me, out of the rain appeared a scarlet macaw. Wounded, and heavy with rain. You were as I was.”

Her chair rocks gently. The outside street sounds like the rainforest. Coming alive with sounds of the busy life of the people below. Here we are, my darling and I, high in the canopy of this paradise we have built.

“You returned to me.” She says one last time.

“Always.” I sing

She touches my scarlet wing, and I see her again in all that she was.