Category: Life

Time and Flight

Hello, Holidailies!

I know more folks do Holidailies than Horrordailies, so perhaps I should just give a little run-down of 2023 so far. This way we can get it over with and move on to better things because friends, unfortunately, this year has been hands-down the most painful year of my life. To review:

In February I witnessed gun violence.

In March Inigo and I said goodbye.

Also in March I was nearly killed by a drunk driver.

In April I popped three discs in my back and was incapacitated to the point of needing a walker, a steroid shot in my back, and a couple of months of physical therapy.

In October I had a massive heart attack, which meant I had to cancel two trips in November, one to England and one to Finland.

And just this week they cut 21 positions at my workplace.

The one amazingly bright moment in the year was a trip to Warsaw with a friend, where I met more friends and got to see my favorite band, Poets of the Fall. The trips to England and Finland would have been more of that friendly and musical goodness, but yeah, no, not just a few weeks out from a heart attack.

But other than that, 2023 was horrible, so I’m ready to kick it right on out the door. Thank goodness for friends and birds.

Speaking of birds, I have a rocking Birdie Balcony Café going on. Birds come and go all day long, from dawn past sundown. I can never seem to get decent photos of them because they get spooked if they see me, but here are a few Mourning Doves, AKA MoDos. They didn’t have a reservation for the table, but okay. Things here are first come, first served.

Three doves on a table.
Three little birds: Every little thing gonna be all right.

There are usually anywhere from three to eight MoDos sitting on the windowsill, table, and balcony railing when I wake up in the morning. They eat with a flock of Sparrows that come for breakfast, then everyone flies off until about 10:30.

And lemme tellya, they all stalk me.

When I went out on the balcony this morning, Sparrows, Northern Mockingbirds and a male Northern Cardinal were in the tree outside my living room window waiting for their mid-morning feeding. They usually come back again around 2:00, bringing the MoDos with them. The Sparrows and MoDos come back around 4:30, and then the MoDos come alone around 6:00, after it gets dark, for dinner. Sometimes the Cardinal also comes by during twilight.

They’re ravenous, too. I just bought a five-pound bag of birdseed last week and it’s almost half gone. Same for a 1.5-pound bag of peanuts. I put crushed, shelled peanuts on the windowsill and the Mockingbirds know that if the Peanut Lady isn’t in her living room, they can tap on the metal part of the windowsill and she’ll appear. While they’re simultaneously eyeballing me and chowing down, I throw whole peanuts in the shell down for the Blue Jays, Crows, and squirrels. It’s like a second job for me, heh.

They keep me company, and for that I’m grateful. I have a huge apartment and it’s kind of cavernous without Inigo. I miss the little guy tremendously, but he has left his imprint on this place and although he has moved on to other things, occasionally I do still feel his presence here. He comes to visit at random times, just to say hello and leave a warm spot on his little bed in his house, which is still in the living room with the door open. When I’m super low, he comes to comfort, landing on my back and spreading his wings over my shoulders in a hug. Sometimes Jimmy the Green Cheek comes with him and lands on my shoulder. Sounds crazy, but I don’t care.

I remember thinking last Christmas that it would be Inigo’s last one. Now this is really strange, but last night the thought came into my head that had he not hurt his leg and needed release from pain, that the day of my heart attack would have been his own day to pass. I don’t know where that thought came from.

Have you ever seen the German TV series Dark? It involves time travel, but not in a hokey Back the the Future kind of way. (You know, because it’s dark.) It’s all about the nature of time, destiny, whether actions are free will or ordained to happen because there is more than one reality and you take the same actions over and over again in each one. There might be minor differences between timelines and realities, but your general story arc produces the same results.

Maybe watching that series had something to do with my thoughts. I don’t really understand quantum physics, time-bending, or things like Schrödinger’s cat, but if there is more than one reality, maybe that heart attack was the pain of Inigo’s passing in an another one. Heaven knows when we said goodbye in this reality, it physically felt like a kick in the chest.

Really, they ought to drum me out of science writing, with theories like that. But who knows? I don’t believe in any gods, but plenty of prominent scientists talk about things like time, other universes, and other realities. If there is science to the concept of multiple realities, I’m all for it.

Lost and Found

Grief does things to people. It has been bothering me that I don’t have any of the orange feathers from Inigo’s legs. I last saw one in the kitchen earlier this year, and foolishly thinking that there would be more chances to save one, I didn’t pay it much mind and eventually it disappeared. I had about given up when tonight I got the strongest feeling that there was one somewhere in the apartment. I looked in his carrier. No. I took apart the dust trap in the dryer. Nope, not there either, though I did find a couple of his woodchips. 

“The kitchen.”

It was like a whisper. 

But I thought, no, that one is gone.

“Another.”

So I started looking in all the places that I haven’t cleaned in the last two weeks, if ever, places where a tiny feather might have landed and been covered in dust.

I got a flashlight and pulled the refrigerator out, and there it was, on the floor, between the refrigerator and the wall, with a little dust bunny. It’s not the same one I lost. That one was a little fuller. But it’s a feather from one of his “socks” and it is one of the most precious things I will ever have. 

Just when I start to think his presence is fading and that he’s leaving, he reminds me that he never will.

In a Breath

I picked up Inigo’s ashes yesterday. I put them in his house for the day before moving them to the nightstand last night. When I held the little box to my heart, his presence was so strong. He felt young and whole and healed. He felt free.

It feels right to keep them in the bedroom. Inigo loved it there. I think that is where he felt safest. I sleep under the birdie quilt now.

The term “Sunday Blues” has taken on new meaning. There’s not much of a point to cooking pasta dinner when it’s just for me.

Even the laundry is different. There are so few towels now in the towel wash now. Just my bath towels, a couple of kitchen towels, and the towel I put under the front door to keep the cooking smells from the hallway out when my neighbor makes whatever stinky fish thing she makes. The towel wash used to include birdie towels from Inigo’s shelf and bar cloths from when I cleaned the cage. I stopped short when I went into the spare bathroom to collect the bar cloths from the edge of the sink and there were none there.

Because you haven’t had to clean his house in over a week.

The days are filled with moments like that now. Opening the drawer and seeing all the unused syringes there. Taking a banana from the fruit bowl and realizing it’s just a banana now, not a NANNER. Seeing Inigo’s follower count go down, little by little, one here, two there. Opening the oven to heat something up, seeing the writing on the bottom where you can put some water if you want to set the oven to self-clean, and realizing there’s nothing stopping me from using that feature because there’s no reason to worry about the fumes. Or the fumes from Scrubbing Bubbles. Or candles, if I had any. Or Carpet Fresh. Or perfume. Or nail polish and nail polish remover. My hands are a mess from my trip to New Orleans earlier this month, the skin dry from washing them in the hard water there. I had preened the wrong feather the day before we said goodbye, and the wound from the nip he gave me has faded into a small pink dot on my hand.

And silence, so much silence, especially when the thermostat shuts the heat off. Sometimes music or turning on the TV helps, but they are irritating as often as not.

I’m still finding feathers, including two last night, bright green, in the home gym, and may the cosmos smite me if I’m lying but they weren’t there yesterday morning or afternoon when I packed his unused syringes in the spare room closet. My floors are dark wood and my gym mat is purple. I would have seen the larger feather for sure.

Inigo is free, but he’s also here, all around, the breath that blows the feathers out from wherever they hide.

I hope I never stop finding them.

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