Paradise: Birds Fly at Sunrise

Chapter Two: The Bird

CHAPTER TWO:

I didn’t blame Charlie for it, but his mention of my name had got me thinking about my mum for the rest of the evening. I knew it was silly and illogical, but I really couldn’t help it. It took me a while to fall asleep, and I when I finally did, I was restless.

But despite being tired, I woke up precisely three minutes before my alarm went off. I rolled over to lie on my back and stared at the ceiling, letting my mind wonder.

My alarm snapped me out of my thoughts and my eyes, which had closed subconsciously, flew open. I sat up, wrapped my covers around me, tucked my pillow under my arm, turned off the alarm, stood up and shuffled over to the window. I stared through the glass before opening it. The balcony was simply a stone paved floor, about three meters square, with the rest of my room’s panelled roof sliding down either side.

 It was an exceptionally clear night; every dot in the sky seemed to be winking at me. It reminded me of something that my dad had once told me. I’d laughed a lot that night, just happy to be spending time with my father alone and undisturbed.

“Only the stars twinkle,” he’d said, “the rest are planets. See that one up there?” he’d pointed to the brightest star we could see through my window, “what do you think that is?”

“A...planet?”

“Very good. That’s Jupiter. Some people think this means good things are going to happen.”

“Are they?” My dad was my very own encyclopaedia and I wanted to know what he thought; his judgement was fact to me.  

“Stars are stars. If we were supposed to be given clues to our lives, we’d have flying raccoons bringing us a newspaper with the details to read with our morning cup of coffee.” That was typically my Dad; making anything he didn’t agree with sound ludicrous to the point where I’d question my strongest beliefs for a moment.  I didn’t know if the stars really could tell us the future, but I thought he was right that we shouldn’t know. What’s life without a little mystery?

            Looking more closely through the glass, only some of the stars seemed to be winking, but they did appear particularly bright tonight. I wondered absently which one of these might be Jupiter, immediately assuming that it was the brightest one and was torn between two, which were probably both wrong anyway.

            I dug my fingers on both hands into the sliders at the left side of the window, awkwardly hunched to keep the duvet from falling and the pillow still jammed between my arm and my body, and was about to slide it open until something else caught my eye. There was something on the balcony. Squinting, I realised that it was my bean-bag. Why was it there? I looked down to the right, where I usually left it, and stared at the empty corner.

 I was sure that I’d brought it inside with me this morning. I would have noticed it on the balcony as I closed the window if I’d forgotten it. But there it was, looking as though I’d just vacated it, with the back still slightly higher than it might have been if I’d have just thrown it on the floor.

I considered that it might have been my dad. I wouldn’t have heard him move the window because I used it so often that it opened silently, a very helpful trait considering that I didn’t want him to know that I still went outside to watch the sunrise every morning.

 Maybe there were some interesting planetary movements tonight that you could only see properly from my balcony and he’d crept out to watch. But then he probably would have brought out his telescope, I would have heard my bedroom door opening, and I was almost positive that he would have woken me and forced me to watch anything space related anyway... Strange.