The Tearsmith

Band Aids

Sensitivity is a refinement of the soul.

The sun wove threads of light through the trees. It was an afternoon in spring and the fragrance of flowers filled the air.

The Grave loomed like a colossus behind me. Lying in the grass, I watched the sky with my arms spread wide as if to embrace it. My cheek was puffy and painful, but I didn't want to keep crying, so I gazed up at the vastness above me, letting myself be cradled by the clouds.

Would I ever be free?

A little noise caught my attention. I looked round and glimpsed something moving in the grass. I got up and decided to carefully approach it, nervously twisting a lock of hair around my fingers.

It was a sparrow. He was scratching the dust with his spindly feet and his eyes shone like black marbles, but one of his wings was stretched out at an unnatural angle and he seemed unable to fly.

When I knelt down, he let out an extremely high-pitched, alarmed chirp, and I sensed that I'd scared him.

'Sorry,' I whispered, as if he could understand me. I didn't want to hurt him – the opposite, I wanted to help him. I felt his desperation as if it was my own. I was also unable to fly, I also wanted to escape, I was also fragile and powerless.

We were the same. Small and defenceless against the world.

I stretched out my hand, wanting to do something to save him. I was just a little girl, but I wanted to give him his freedom back, as if that would somehow bring mine back to me.

'Don't be scared...' I reassured him. I was young enough to believe that he really could understand me. What should I do? Could I help him? As he withdrew, terrified, I felt something resurfacing in my memory.

'Tenderness, Nica,' my mother's voice whispered. 'Tenderness, always...Remember that.' Her soft eyes were imprinted in my memory.

I gently took the sparrow in my hands, careful not to hurt him. I didn't let him go, not even when he pecked my fingers, not even when his little legs scratched my fingertips.

I held him close to my chest and promised him that one of us, at least, would get our freedom back.

I returned to the institute and immediately asked Adeline, an older girl, for help, praying that the matron wouldn't discover what I'd found – I feared her cruelty more than anything else.

Together, Adeline and I took a popsicle stick from the garbage to use as a splint, and for the next few days I smuggled crumbs from our meals to the hiding place I had found for him.

He pecked at my fingers many times, but I never gave up.

'I'll make you better, you'll see,' I promised him, my fingers red and painful. He ruffled his breast feathers. 'Don't you worry...'

I spent hours watching him, a little distance away so as not to scare him.

'And you'll fly,' I whispered. 'One day, you'll fly, and you'll be free. Just a little longer...just wait a little longer...'

He pecked me when I tried to check on his wing. He tried to stay away from me. But every time, I persisted with tenderness. I made him a bed out of grass and leaves and whispered to him to be patient.

And the day he got better, the day he flew away from my hands, was the first time in my life I felt a little less dirty and dull. I felt a little more alive.

A little freer.

As if I could breathe again.

I found within me the colours I didn't think I had. The colours of hope.