How I Learned to Hold Sick Birds ( And Subsequently Everything Else)

A story about keeping your palm open and holding birds

When I was seventeen, and sitting on the back porch of Roswell Public Library my eyes caught something, a bird. A tiny red robin, really just a child who had fallen through the fence. I could see he was hurt but for a second I couldn't move- as if there was an invisible thread running through my body holding me hostage. It seemed all my life when there was urgency fulfilling itself in front of me, I could never pull myself off the sidelines. Though I somehow ran over to him. His tiny eyes looked up to mine. I could see my eyes back in his eyes and there we looked indispensably similar. With no time to overthink I grabbed him and wrapped him into my jacket. He could see my uneasiness as he pushed softly into my palm. We rode through my hometown, past main street, the markets, and the waterfall. I did not call anyone, I didn't ask for help as I rode past Rick's bird store. I couldn't, I just couldn't. The thread pulled me tighter but questions about how I would save him spilled out like black ink in the back of my mind. We took the shortcut through the stream. The logic that since that's where I always went to be alone, to be healed, to quietly pick over all the pain I had caused or had been caused on me- that there is where he would get better too, at least for an afternoon.

 After a long time he drank and slept there in my hand, wings torn. At that moment I began to dream about a life we could share together. Days on the lake, him unable to fly and me, unable to cut my thread of silence, my fear of connection. I sat with that, the fact that my ticking, my lists and fear to speak with even so much as a bird specialist would cause this little creature to suffer. The robin who became the sudden namesake, the material object of everything, and everyone that stands waiting on the other side of my anxiety. At this time it was almost dark and he rested with my old t-shirt as his only bandage. I took scissors to the thread. For the first time in my life I cut up the thread of fear inside of me. All the times before where I had sat back frozen came out of me, everything I had forgotten to say rushed over me. I took him into my basket, I left the creek, blood still rushing through his small body. I biked like lightning to the bird shop, the sign said closed. I remember thinking, "I am not a person who bangs on doors".That day I learned to yell. "HELP! HEY ANYONE HERE? RICK HELP ME THERE A BIRD". Rick, an eighty year old man with a cane came right to the door almost to his knees laughing. Just the site of a shy teenage girl banging on the closed door of a bird shop with a bloody baby robin in her hands. After a minute I laughed too and to my surprise he unlatched the door and let us in. The rest of the night he switched up the robin letting me blot off the excess blood. That night I learned about his man, whose shop I had passed all of my life. I wasn't me that night, I told him everything about the creek, my poetry, the deep fear in my chest, my dreams- the ones I file away in old notebooks. I most clearly remember the cold Coca Cola's on the table. As he held out a hand of calm words and counsel and for the first time I accepted without fear.

The next weeks passed in a brown syrupy blur- I left the creek alone, came to class, asked questions without force. I rode to and from the bird shop to share snacks with Rick and read next to August (a name Rick chose, it being the last hopeful month before leaves hit the ground). A month later as fall drizzle came down over my new friends we stopped in together one last time to see August. For the last time I took him into my hand, and again as if he could feel my unease he pushed into me one last time. I opened my fingers. With all the force of the sweetness he had let into my life and let him go.

I could see as he flew away, and as I waved goodbye to my friends on the way home that now in honoring him I would resign to hold everything like a bird. Holding, speaking, loving, trying and knowing that when it flies away, when he leaves, when your efforts are left unblessed with awards and hearts still not perfectly aligned I will still look up. Now I hold everything like I held him with the knowledge that if I don't hold on tight enough, if I don't pick up sick birds, bang on some doors and run for life towards connection and ambition my hands will be empty. Knowing all the same that if I hold too tightly I will kill anything real about it. I hold it all like a bird.