I was forced to live in a jar filled with formaldehyde so I couldn't see or breathe, but I remained aware of it, living but not really alive in the putrid murky liquid. When I woke up at 6:30 in the dark morning I was sweating; my nightmare haunted me; I decided I would get up.
I thought I was the only one in the whole universe who was awake. The thought was terrifying. I felt very small.
A sound came just above my head then, like footsteps. It was a robber upstairs in the kitchen! It was just the time for robbers, 6:30 in the dark morning when no one else was awake. I had to tell my mother.
But she wasn't in her bed. She had been abducted. I abandoned all good judgment and ran up the stairs to the kitchen where I heard the noise, armed with nothing but my two small fists, determined to fight this robber to the death before I let my mother die at his hand.
But the robber was not there. Instead, at the kitchen table sat my mother, fully dressed as though the day had begun long ago, sipping a cup of black coffee, pouring over a green leather notebook she bought at Harrod's department store in London.
"What's the matter?" She moved toward me in a moment of instinctual maternal panic. I was in a sweat, just gaping at her. She rubbed the back of my nightgown. "Did you have a bad dream?"
I still couldn't answer. I was still in shock. She scooped me up and put me against her shoulder. Then, I saw out the window.
Everything outside was already awake. The clouds were stained orange and dark blue right above the mountain; the flowers yawned and uncurled; the trees began to regain their color. And in the apple tree just outside the window, hundreds and hundreds of birds.
* * *
I don't want to go to Chicago. Why did I ever want to go to Chicago? I wanted to be defiant. I wanted to prove something ambiguous to someone who is gone now, and now I am actually going and I don't want to go.
People belong in one place. They are not meant to get into planes and fly great distances. If people were meant to fly, they would have evolved with wings. No, people are meant to walk. Walking exists for day-to-day convenience; for survival. It is certainly not meant for long-distance travel.
The planes look so unnatural at their mathematical angles as they go up and up and disappear. Their wings are so still and unchanging. I am not a bird.
* * *
"You are my bird." He says it to be romantic, because he knows that I love to get up early to watch the one yellow warbler - perhaps the only remaining yellow warbler in the world, because he is the only one I have ever seen - eat at my feeder; because he knows I draw them in the margins of my notebook. He says it because he thinks it will get him laid, because he knows it will get him laid, because he wants to get laid by a bird. I can't blame him. So I kiss him harder than before, knowing what he thinks only he knows, knowing he only said it because it was pretty.
* * *
In Chicago, in Hyde Park, it is colder than I expected it to be. I am wearing layers of old sweaters my grandmother knitted for my mother that she has since outgrown. I smoke American Spirits, but they're ten dollars a pack here because the cigarette tax is so high, so I try not to smoke very much, and besides my roommates hate it. I only smoke on these long walks I take outside every once in a while to see the parrots.
No one expects parrots in Chicago. Chicago is supposed to be shades of gray, not bright green and yellow. Chicago is supposed to hum monotonously, not squawk. Still, somehow, there are hundreds of monk parakeets in Hyde Park. They build these tremendous nests out of sticks and leaves, and they positively scream (sing?) at the top of their lungs while they sit in the trees, so they're easy to find.
The story is that once, thirty-something years ago, someone had been breeding a few monk parakeets in their home and had let them go for whatever reason. Against all odds, the parakeets thrived and multiplied, finding unlikely habitats in the enormous sycamores along Lake Shore Avenue and the maples by all the churches on 59th. Somehow - and no one can really understand why - the tropical birds began to survive even better than they do in their home country of Mexico. Every year there are more of them: happy parakeets making a home in the gray, humming city.
* * *
The feeling I had when I graduated could only be described as peculiar. You are supposed to feel wonderful and you are supposed to get drunk. I did neither. I was confused and tired and hungry but not hungry at all. So I locked myself in my mother's study where all the good books were, deciding to let someone in a poem describe my feeling for me - that was always the easiest way.
But next to the John Ashbery volumes was a green, leather notebook. Out of curiosity, I opened it up.
"June ninth, twenty-two sparrows and three chickadees so far, possible repeats," someone had written, and then there were eight pages of pencil-lead drawings of birds, and then came June tenth. It went through August, and every day the drawings got better and better. On the second to the last day: "The first yellow warbler I've ever seen today. A thrill."
* * *
Dear One:
If you can leave and go to the University of Oregon which is eight hours driving distance from me, I am going to go to Chicago, which is much farther. I am going to go and study journalism and wear fancy dresses every day and eat out at Thai restaurants and you can't come with. Now I am vindicated. Now you know that I don't really love you either, no, no, I never really loved you either. You are deluded to think I loved you at all. I am glad you went to the University of Oregon, eight hours driving distance from me. We are separate entities you and I. Individuals, isn't that how you put it? Yes. That is how you put it. I hope you have a lovely time at your University. I shall have to send you a postcard.
Love,
P.S. I am sorry I "screamed" at you. I was not "screaming." I was only singing, really, and you think there is a difference.
* * *
My mother helped me hang a suet feeder right outside my bedroom window.
"Now they'll wake you up every morning with their racket," she said.
"Not racket."
"At 6:30 in the morning, trust me, you'll think it is racket," she said. She paused. A look came into her eye like I was a stranger, or a photograph she had never seen before, but then the look passed and she said, "I wonder who will watch the birds when you have gone away."
* * *
I bought a pair of parakeets at the pet store last week because they looked so depressed all crammed in the tiny cages the way they were. I turned the storage room downstairs into an aviary with touch-lights; tall, ferny plants; six wooden dowels hung from wire to perch on; a table and chairs. This was a good set-up for a pair of domesticated birds; really, very luxurious.
There's a cage, too, for the food and water, but it's just so small. I wired the door to the cage open and left the birds alone for a few days to explore the sanctuary I had built, but five days later they were still inside.
"The door is open," I finally said out loud, thinking I might be able to get through to them. No response from the parakeets. I stuck my hand in the cage to demonstrate that, indeed, objects could pass in and out of the door. Nothing. Finally, I put on some gloves and tried to grab them to transfer them to their lofty new environment. The birds clutched the wire on the inside of their cage for dear life, until they were chirping so loudly and biting with such force that I had to let go.
* * *
I'm going to have to let you go. You were the force that kept me on the ground. I realize now that I am meant to be up in the sky.