The Birds

The kettle whistles.

It all starts with glass and grinding, grating brakes. Shattering into nothing. Black.

When my life first started it was a tumult of record players and rocking horses. I didn’t have any other option but to succumb to the environment.

And everything was so alive.

Now, I feel trapped. My only home is the shower where I place a cloth down and let the water build up until it’s nearly overflowing. Only at that point do I squirt the plastic receptacle filled with fake blood everywhere even though it's food colouring I imagine I’m in a sea of blood, perhaps on the ocean of Charon.

In that small world. Is where I’m alive.

Or awake so alone in the early morning watching the television hum and simmer under no supervision but my own.

Legos on the floor drowned in rivers of crimson and porcelain overflowing stuffed with the corpse of another plastic doll.

Crawling across that sagging wood filled with nails of decay, expecting to one day sink into the space underneath where the arachnids live. Soon, to reclaim this home.

Those birds. They always chirp. So incessantly. And in this black while I sink into the couch and she still moans about feeding them.

Twice a day. One cup of birdseed.

The blue-faced budgies still chirp and shit onto the curled pieces of the decayed newspaper I was meant to clean a week ago.

I feel the numb splinters weathered from age slip past my fingers when at one day in the past they’d scrape and slalom inside of my skin.

I reset my neck. Creaking with the mansion. Staring up at a chandelier that used to burn brightly lighting up guests holding whiskey on the rocks and gins with a slice of lemon now caked in eternal dust.

The dust, when you enter, stepping inside. It’s a strange material that feels disturbed but won’t leave. Like the last house guest adamant about staying over; they only need a blanket that’s what they say until you find them hand gripped like a puppy’s paw reaching onto its owner but it's your cabinet filled with fine China.

That dust. It reaches everywhere.

I cup my mouth and ascend upstairs into oblivion.

Lying in that dank bed, nestled in the warmth of the sheets I laid this morning out of instinct and the thirst for repetition I let the night envelop me as I drift away to the drone of crackling lungs that will soon expire.

Tomorrow, it comes in the day.

--

I clutch my face awake and think of when I was dreaming of someone making me tea but it’s only me and her.

Has she expired?

I fall into a life where she maybe has and only imagine black. As easy as it is to let go it’s just as easy to forget what another person offers to your life until they aren’t there.

Raking my tussled hair to the side into a whole new tangled mess I feel the thud of my foot colliding with those disfigured floorboards.

No echo.

But imagine the echo if she would just fix it and not wheeze and cough and sleep all day and demand that I feed those damned birds.

I don’t think it’s the doing that does you in. It’s more the repetition and opportunity you believe was there but never was.

You’ll never say you’re going to do something if you aren’t doing it right now and telling people you’re going to do it is even worse.

It only cements your place in reality.

But if you still hear the call then sometimes you might be able to break away from the monotony of capitalism and all of its empty gifts…

Snatched away from my thoughts I hear…

That echo. It reverberates. So soothing. So calm. So soul-satisfying.

But there’s no respite here trapped inside of home movies and picture albums beginning to drip with sepia underneath Sellotape. Life feels as though it’s one of those tapes you pressed record on when the movie starts and press stop when it ends. Always rewinding it back to the start and repeating the same mistakes you always made before.

They say history repeats itself and that’s true but history is a huge scale of humanity, it dehumanises you. What they should say is that people repeat themselves. We’re a whole bunch of creatures played on repeat and now with access to see everyone we’re only seeing ourselves reflected against each other with social media as the mirror. The good and the ugly reflected back at you and when you see the worst of humanity you’ll say that’s not me and laugh but it was more than likely you at some point in your life.

Stumbling into the echo chamber of the bathroom. Looking into the deep black dark hole of the mirror seeing all characteristics of the life I’ve designed for myself I slip on the puddle of piss I’ve created underneath my feet and hit my head on the lid and then nothing.

Drifting into another kind of drunken silence only drunks can understand.

--

Birds chirping.

Is that an alarm?

I think.

But no…

One of those damned budgerigars is on my head.

And when I touch my face it feels tentative and the bird flies away.

I have to get up because today’s the day.

Shaking it off, I go to the kitchen in a blur and touch the kettle to see if it’s still warm.

Good enough for me.

I pour two cups and move up those sagging stairs. Every footfall could be my last. Body aching and heart-wrenching, I enter the bedroom. The other budgie is waiting over her like a harbinger of death. Chirping and cawing and taunting me to come near.

I move forward and it lashes out. Then lands back on her heaving shoulder.

She reaches her ash-coloured fingers out to me. skin stretches across bone, so I take it and grip that fragility as tight as I can, bringing the lukewarm tea to her lips and she sips.

“It’s hardly brain surgery,” she says.

“It’s nothing like that,” I say.

But it is.

“Let me put your birds back in their house.”

“My birds?”

“They’re here.”

She smiles when one sits on my shoulder and the other her.

“We need to go now.”

I let her snuggle into her favourite pillow one last time before I put the budgies back in their cage and gently nudge her awake; her best clothes in hand.

“It’s time to go.”

“Are the birds okay?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, where are we going?”

“To the shops.”

I get her dressed and we move slowly down those old forgotten stairs with tears rolling down my cheeks she asks me, “it isn’t the brain, is it?”

And I say, “no, everything’s going to be fine.”