A Bird’s Vacation Plans

The view is familiar. Familiar it was, but not appealing. A view I saw a hundred times, and I looked away from it perhaps two times that number; as in each occasion, I look away once, then my eyes come to rest at it again, then the second looking-away comes, and so it goes.

Detestable? I wouldn’t exactly say so, as I’m not one to detest, or at least that’s what I try to be. Migration was always my least favorite part of the year, so are the places over which I fly during these migration trips. They remind me of the goodbyes I had to utter to my old nest; which I came to label it as “old”. How cruel is that? To have something that once has constituted your world, and now when talking about it you ought to precede it with the word “old”, or with the prefix “ex-”?!

But this time is different. Yes, it’s inherently different.

This time I’m not setting trips running away from the cold winter; I’m not running away from something this time, I’m running towards one. This time the trip isn’t migration, it’s a vacation!

I turned my eyes from looking downward, to look instead forward. I could tell, watching the new view of the clouds ahead of me, the clouds that promise new lands beneath them, I could tell that my looking eyes were looking dreamy. We all have looked at something, and knew instantly without looking in a mirror, that our eyes are glowing and gleaming. And as the habit of such occasions, something always seems to come along and stand in the way of the full-painting of the portray: One’s joy gets cut short, by the ever-quickening pace of one’s demons, that always seem to catch up to you every time you think you’ve at last outrun them.

The demon this time, was none other than my loneliness.

I had no companions on my vacation; normally, you don’t get many of those when sneaking out. The nest isn’t one that’s large, so maneuvering my way through my sleeping family members and my still-egged brothers was no easy task. But I got out eventually. I spent the first couple of miles looking back as I was flying away, till the nest became so distant that it disappeared out of sight. Was I really going for only a vacation?

No need to brood little bird, no need to brood. Just fill your lungs with the air f freedom for the time being. But how much does that “time being” extend? One thing I know for sure that it has such a short blanket, that covers only so much of your trembling body, and protects you for only too long; so it’s short-lived as well. moments fade away, good or bad. especially the good. Not only we worry about how lasting that moment would be, but also if it would be the last of its kind.

The horizon changed. The scene shifted. The pictures, though seemingly the same, assembled in a completely new manner as if were parts of a jigsaw that has multiple solving ways. Many cottages I see usually as I fly over the countryside, but this one, for some unknown, or yet to be known reason, was so irresistibly gripping to me. As If I was armored with heavy metal and the cottage was a gigantic magnet, I promptly landed on its porch saying to myself: let’s just rest a little.

The cottage was quiet, as it was expected to be in the early dawn. But in there, amidst the calmness, I sensed movement.

Carefully stepping boots, overstuffed, or rather rushly-stuffed bag, and finally a pearly-white beard. That what I was able to make out initially through the enveloping darkness, that was beginning to be penetrated by sun rays. Then the door to the cottage was silently opened, and an old man made his presence felt. He was looking right and left, and was looking away instantly as if right and left were looking back at him and he was evading eye contact. Oughtn’t to evade eye contact with the staircase though, wouldn’t have slammed his seemingly-fragile body on the ground the way he had. Under my watchful eyes, he stood up shaking off the dust and gathering the scattered clothes back in the bag. Then he preceded forward, with a neck that relentlessly kept twisting backward, as he was looking back at the left-behind cottage.

The scene was too familiar for me not to step in and put an end to my time as merely a witness.

I wasn’t in the habit of bearing being a mere witness for too long anyway, and what a bearing this had on many events, that would have gone differently otherwise.

I landed on his head with force, or with what I defined as force. He wasn’t aware of me instantly as I was expecting. So I dialed up my forcefulness: I started teasing him by virtue of my pointed beak. Finally, up he looked, becoming aware of my presence.

What exactly did I have in view doing this? there couldn’t have been any more barriers in the way of answering this question: The answer couldn’t have been any blurrier; since I left the nest, all things have been so unbearably dreamy. However, the answer to the question of why am I doing what I’m doing became a little demystified when I looked back at the cottage, as if there were something telling me to do so… and I saw what I saw.

There in the distance was a kid looking through the dewy window of his house, with the dewy windows to his soul. I felt my heart throbbing inside my rib cage, and it came over me all at once: This is wrong!

And now, I know what I have in view doing what I do: I’ve got to make the old man look back. Yes, maybe he did look bak, but maybe he didn’t look back enough.