Awakening

 To him, all days look the same, with very small changes worth mentioning. Slowly, his routine was turning firm, solidified in an adult and responsible stability. It happened right at the point when his hands used to hurt by how much he would practice his art, constantly writing, to the point of complete exhaustion. Before, there were pain every night, but his spirit was in peace and that internal fraction of the Man responsible to take care of his Inspiration looked satisfied. It was like a Bird, tired of flying, taking small and restorative naps, sleeping nights full of dreams.

However, doing what you love is a privilege, and not everybody have it. The Man saw his time coming to an end, a temporary one, like a pause. He accepted it as fact that he needed to abandon what he loved, for some time, to traverse a crisis. Taken by pain, he cooped up his Bird, locking the rare wings that needed now to stop and wait.

Slowly, the pain on his hands started to disappear, turning day by day in the tiredness of the work to survive, in strong hits against the cage inside him. Gradually, the body suffering turned into an unbearable pain on the Bird. Slowly, in the cold and dark, it started to sleep.

Day by day, the Bird stay at that state, looking dead on the outside sometimes, barely breathing.

At some ordinary morning, the Man woke up, slightly less falsely excited than usual, in front of a day that would be full of work, without chances to write. You could say he felt empty, maybe tired or hurt. Or sleeping.

In fact, he couldn’t feel anything. The Bird was deeply asleep, without dreams, with the vague perception of being asleep. The Man, then, felt as if he was cold and motionless inside.

He would get up all days, get out of his bed, look at his to do list, a long and inhuman one, and group them with the work that was making him scrap by. Coffee was his constant companion, not by the caffeine effect anymore, but due to the habit of drinking a bitter thing. The lethargy of his interior sleep would hit him all the time, like a nauseating and painful wave of sickness.

And then, he would continue to work, in hope of seeing the end of a seemingly eternal crisis. Be it rainy or sunny outside, his window opened accordingly, he would push forward. The smell of humid earth or dust coming inside, in a place where the wind was always strong and sometimes constant. Oh, and how he worked. His glasses were always blurry, his mind always flying, calculating, problem-solving, analyzing, dealing with all that would be thrown his way. His hands were not hurting, but they were doing everything except what they want.

And so the man would continue, day after day, withering slowly, loosing weight, feeling hungry and thirsty, as did the Bird.

It started to wither too, while waiting for the end of it’s slumber in a silent lethargy. The cage could be accumulating snow or dust, if it weren’t inside the Man.

Being a rare type of Bird, unique of the world, it slumbered peacefully, surviving from his own reserves, he slept while the whole world was shaking around him and the crisis kept going. Nevertheless, the end of the crisis would never come. Then, another force approached the cage. At start, it was silent, peeking at the Man’s routine, waiting for the attention he and the Bird would often give her.

And the days keep passing, the tension turning agonizing, as if all of them were waiting for something to happen and push them outside their inertia.

On another ordinary day, apparently like all the others, another painful day, the Man would wait for the sunrise, exhausted in body and mind. No sleep would free him from the tiredness that was eating him away slowly. It was another normal day, with nothing special happening in it. Except that, maybe, that was a special day. Maybe it was the number it was on the calendar, or perhaps the moment of the early morning that the thought came to him, or maybe worse, maybe it was a mere coincidence, caused by the accumulated entropy of the universe, tired of waiting for the Man and his internal cold and dark winter.

As storms would roar in the outside world, crisis tried to build one upon the other. It was the end of a winter, maybe not so rainy as it would be in other years, but the wind was still violent and speedy, as appropriate for that time of the year.

Closed windows, the smell of coffee filling the air, the news about a worse crisis coming up, initially dealt with… with a wait.

A literal pause on the city and the activities, while the crisis would take away lives and works and dreams.

There, the silent figure that were getting more and more agitated around the cage, made the Man remember her. During his first lock-down night, she filled him with ideas, that got lost in the darkness of his dreamless sleep. During the second night, over the sound of the rain, she filled him with the songs he loved. In the third one, the silent force filled him with his own pain, bleeding his deepest wounds at himself so he could remember.

Remember her. Remember who he were. Remember the Bird.

With a vision blurred by memories, his hands started to break the barriers he built around his own mind and heart and the Man exposed himself to cold and analytical lenses. His lenses. Pen and paper came up. He would observe himself, his fingers starting to move by themselves, sliding trough the instruments of his craft, the objects that helped made him who he was. Ink started to act, taking form, moving as by a far bigger will than of the Man that would hold the pen.

Inside the cage, the Bird would move.

He breathed heavily, scared by the possibilities opening up in front of him. They say Inspiration comes whenever she wants, not when the artists want. They’re like hostages for her, a bratty, spoiled terrorist used to receive everything she wants whenever she asks for it.

For many times, she would tickle the Bird, wanting attention, building up the growing need to put those wings to do what they did best. She called the bird many times, but the Man and his work would stop her.

Patiently, just like the Man, the Inspiration was waiting for a proper moment for the small Bird to awake. Though the intensity of the desire just grew up, in that early morning, when the man touched his instruments, all started to move. It was like a dam being broken by the water. Or a volcanic explosion. Or an avalanche of snow.

The wings would agitate themselves, as Inspiration started to dance around the Man, letters starting to form. White background, black ink, simple at first. A title, noisy thoughts, the loud sound of the rain, a cold and bitter coffee, calendar being looked at by the corner of the eye from time to time. Cautious, the Man’s mind would visualize how much of what he loved he could do in days like these. Like that day. Like today.

Inspiration started to sing behind him, externalizing all her desire of becoming words, that slowly started to appear in a sheet of paper. Then two of them. Maybe three after some time. The cage would creak under the power of Inspiration. The Man’s hands didn’t hurt, but they felt warm, taken by a passionate fervor that only those who love art can understand,

Then, the first rain of the tropical spring started to stop.

The many padlocks on the cage fell, as if by their own will.

Warmth on his hands turned into sun rays, pushing away the coldness of his interior with a cosmic brutality. They flowed over his exposed wounds, that suddenly disappeared. His pain started to fade, to soon become just a small echo of what it once was. Then, the pain turned into a force, just like Inspiration, and sat at the corner of the room: peeking at the Man from afar, without leaving, just waiting for her turn.

But that morning belonged to Inspiration.

And then, it belonged to the Bird.

In lands of the north, there is a single, unique type of bird, that does sleep in the winter. Just like the inner bird of the man. It’s wings close, their bodies quiet down until it looks dead and the bird sleep a silent and dreamless dream, waiting for the end of the winter around him.

And, with the returning of the warmth, the Bird awakened. The padlocks of the cage all hit the floor glowing by the light of the Inspiration. Word started forming faster, as the wands were moving quickly and almost failing in following the ideas.

The cage door then opened, without too much noise. It was like taking stretching out and then shaking to take the snow out of it. Or the rust.

The hands kept going, faster and faster, as the world around the Man disappeared from his cautious look while he was writing.

Writing for himself, and writing for the Inspiration.

More importantly, he was writing for the Bird that now started to move. It was shy at first, as he extended his wings for the first time in a long time.

The sun entered by the window and, at the end of the winter, the Bird joined the Inspiration and start singing, both followed by the silent gaze of a Man that was wholesome again.

Awakened, to become a writer again.

He left it’s slumber for a spring of simply doing what he loved, at least until the next crisis started to loom closer again.

However, for that morning, humble three aimless pages were a good place to start.