Birds

What an unrelentingly unappealing existence man chose for himself. You’d think, being a woman, I might be spared the same arrangement.

But my mother passed it to me in a sealed box she labeled ‘security.’

She was just as shackled as I am now.

Still, she handed it over like a heirloom.

Smile through it, she’d remind me.

Don’t speak too much. Don’t write.

Don’t wear that offensively orange jumper.

Don’t slouch. Don’t let them know you’re tired.

I like to watch office mobs drain into the streets at 8 a.m., like spilled mercury becoming level.

Drifting toward overpriced coffee like iron dust to a magnet.

Sometimes I join them. Most days, I watch.

Now and then, I fantasize about slapping my manager across the face.

Then walking out. Finding something loud and nefarious to do instead.

But I’m a coward, so I sit here. Obedient. Filing away one monotonous task after another.

Other times, I pretend I’m a poet.

Or someone avant-garde with calloused fingers, a rotating cast of offbeat friends, and enough stories to fill a reservoir.

I disappear into myself constantly,

digging through the wreckage for something salvageable.

I am a trash bin in a pencil skirt.

Sprayed with the saccharine musk of cheap, off-brand, department store perfume.

And somehow, no one notices.

Everyone else’s eyes seem to have turned inward too

white, glassy and consumed.

I’ve decided that one cigarette a day is good for me.

Better than introspection.

Maybe this is humanity’s flaw—

too much brain,

not enough silence.

We mistake mania for insight.

We marvel at the world’s wreckage and then chain ourselves to the factory line.

Maybe if I were a bird, I’d feel free.

Small brain. No memory.

That has a strange appeal.

She says it half-laughing, but her voice catches.

Then: a snap. Her body arches. Her breath shortens.

Her spine twists backward like a cracked branch.

She lets out a strangled gasp—something between a sob and a scream.

Her skin shudders.

Then erupts.

Feathers, slick and ash-colored, push through her pores like splitting seams.

Her fingers stiffen, then fuse.

Her eyes glaze.

Hair falls out in soaked clumps.

Her body folds in on itself.

And the woman begins to lose her mind.

Draped in feathers, a seagull’s scratchy cry,

Confined to grey and winged form.

The skies, once vast, now seem crossed with invisible lines,

Yellow lines drawn on pavement - thought to be the norm.

She’s now a slave to every useful urge

Fading into mindless entropy;

No choice but flight, no freedom to diverge,

No thought, just endless striving to be free.

We might’ve warned her when wishing to be free

“Be careful what you wish for”.

The mind was never release now useless as a pea

That chain you wore a relentless reflection of the choices you bore

No choice, no will, no light to leave behind.

Freedom fades to black within neglectful minds.

We watch the bird turn her head from side to side, before shaking her feathers and stretching them wide. She flaps them once, then twice, then a third time before lifting her feet off the ground. Her head hits the glass of the windowpane before flying out into the open air where she is lost in a flock of grey and white birds flying in perfect unison