Fly Away little Birdie

I’ll never forget how my skull knocked against the rigid red bricks of the front gate and the stream of tears rushing down my face but not a noise coming out of my mouth. Fear, rage and frustration shot through my veins making me tremble like a helpless dog, cowering with its tail between its legs. There was just a fuzzy jumbled mess of screams and something that sounded like a dog barking. My mother threw herself in front of me making a barrier between him and I while my brother pleaded for him to stop.

I looked up at the sky. It was endlessly blue with not a cloud in sight. It seemed like it could go on forever and within the span of just a few minutes I felt older, more tired and somewhat different. This was one of many beautiful days that had quickly turned sour and the reason for it I could not understand. While he barked at me through the arms of my mother protecting me, all I could really come to understand were the stream of repeating words rushing through my head.

“What did I do to deserve this?”

“What did I do to deserve this?”

“What did I do?”

From one moment to another I was dragged off the ground, through the iron bars that gated our house and down the street to the plaza I would escape to almost every day. I found myself in the middle of the field, sobbing uncontrollably, almost unable to breathe.

“Baby, please stop crying,” my mother said softly, almost desperately.

There was nothing she could do but hold me there surrounded by open air until I grew quieter and quieter with a few hiccups here and there. We sat there for a while, dreading our return to the house. We didn’t say much about what had happened for there was not much more that we could say that we hadn’t discussed during past occasions.

He had to change. We crossed seas for him to be happy yet there was nothing that we could do to satisfy him. We didn’t know why he was angry or why he was so unhappy but it always had to come to this. He had to change, but by that point we knew that changing him was close to impossible if he didn’t believe he had to. Over time I found that I had changed instead. I was just a girl back then; I was supposed to love my dolls and dresses and be “delicate like a lady” just as he had always demanded but I had grown to like the taste of freedom and sometimes it required a little bit of rebellion.

Neither he or my mother or anyone else knew that I cried myself to sleep almost every night, screaming into my pillow and reaching into the darkness of my room as if I could crawl out to somewhere new or just any place other than home. I was just a girl but I wanted to go. I wanted to escape maybe somewhere nice and sunny and enjoy beautiful days instead of suffer them. I felt like an enclosed animal, slowly becoming smaller and weaker, deprecating in my cell. I was suffocating in my own home and nobody knew it.

My mother went home a few hours before I did after making sure I was well and collected. I stayed there through the golden hour under the mango trees, admiring the light of the sun and all the glorious freedom it had in that big blue sky of hers.

Suddenly I heard loud echoed squawking coming from above me. There were three of them. Macaws of red, blue and green perched on the branches far into the trees. I had heard that Macaws had escaped from the zoo a few days before, and I knew it had to be them for no one had seen Macaws in the city for ages. I don’t know how you can tell if a Macaw is happy, but they seemed happy to me. Fresh into the world, basking in the summery climate and enjoying all the mangoes their hearts desired. I was glad that they escaped. I had visited that zoo once and it was the most dreadful place I had ever seen. It reminded me of home and I wanted to go and let all the captives loose but there was nothing that I could do.

I sat on a wooden bench looking up at them with all my wonder that in only a few moments turned into longing and sorrow as they took off and flew far beyond the tiled roofs of the houses surrounding the plaza.

“Fly away little birdies,” I whispered as if it were forbidden, “be free.”

When I went home that night, trudging my feet along the rugged concrete, I knew something had cracked inside me (and it wasn’t my head). There was no one in the world who would rescue me like a princess and no miracle that would open the door to my cage to let me fly away like the Macaws. After that day, words would turn into action, dreams would turn into reality and freedom would no longer seem like a pipe dream but a steady goal.

Within the next few months high school would be over and somehow, I got my ticket out. I had told him that I was going to leave one day but that was another thing he refused to believe. He called me selfish for it and tried to make me believe I didn’t deserve it. Maybe I didn’t deserve it, maybe I did, but that wasn’t any concern of mine. All I knew was that I needed to escape, I got my chance, and I took it.