As Vivências

Bye-bye Gray Bird Baby. Blue Bird Drowns In Gray. [5]

For nearly five brief weeks, I was blessed with the quiet miracle of loving him. I cherished him as one might a fragile dream - tenderly, reverently - as though he were a daughter born not of blood, but of feathers and song. He would nip at me with his delicate beak, carving miniature hieroglyphs upon my skin - wounds so gentle they felt like endearments, like nature's own embroidery upon my roughness. Some of those scars remain, etched like fading constellations. But none compare to the wound he left when he departed - a gash he crafted not with talons, but with silence.

And the cruelty of it all lies in the fact that the fault is mine. It festers in me like rot. I failed him - not through malice, but through the soft negligence of trust. If time could be bent, if fate could be unspooled and rewoven, I would have kept him safe within the quiet dimness of our little home - a place where sunlight rarely spilled, yet which he illuminated from within like a lantern in the dusk.

I saw his death unfold not before me, but through me. He launched skyward from my shoulder - sudden, defiant, radiant - chasing something only he could see. I froze. My hands, once his haven, remained still. I watched as he vanished into a brief arc of grace, only to fall with terrible finality. The sound - that brittle, snapping sound - did not lie. It cleaved the moment in two. In one breath, he was alive. In the next, the world was dimmed.

And I was not the only heart left hollow.

Hello, my little blue bird. I returned him to you, just as I had promised - though not in the way either of us had wished. I cannot articulate what passed through your gaze when you beheld his still form. But I know what bloomed in my chest, and I saw its mirror in your oceanic eyes. You wept without tears. You unraveled without sound. Your sorrow was not a tempest - it was the tide retreating, slow and devastating. You screamed then, a sound so raw and final it splintered the silence. When I held you, you no longer trembled with trust. That sanctuary had vanished, flown away with him.

And I cannot blame you.

The emptiness he left behind has weight - it settles on the furniture, in the walls, in the hush that greets me each time I return home. I made myself a vow: not to fill the void with replacement or distraction, not to summon life merely to muffle the ache. But I was weak - not for mourning, but for being unequal to the burden of guilt. My guilt.

Still, love remains. Even now.

Wherever you are, wherever your soul glides -
know that you are still loved.
Farewell, my gray-winged child.