me & the birds

I was not prepared for how much time I would dream, in the first few days and weeks after we found out we’d lost the pregnancy. I was always at sea. Sometimes deep underwater, sometimes floating somewhere miles from shore, with nothing in sight but waves. When I was awake, the only thing that soothed me from a raw scream was watching the same thing on a screen, curled in the corner of our sofa. I wanted ocean documentaries like you’d crave a steak, or water. 

I watched hours of David Attenborough videos, his unemotional narration murmuring over fish and sharks and sea anemones. Most of it blurred together. I remember one about the Mariana Trench. They dropped bait miles below the surface and watched as pale blind creatures no one had ever seen before emerged from somewhere they never should have survived.

After a while, documentaries weren’t enough for me. I needed to be up close to something. So I began to watch birds. I memorized their spots – the trees and apartment complexes they gathered in the mornings, cooing and pecking. I crawled out of bed and left the house before sunrise just so I could see more of them. I wanted to catch them in their spring songs and dramas. I watched birds so much that I began to recognize individual birds in my neighborhood, at least the ones with unusual-enough markings (Old Splotchhead was essentially a celebrity to me). 

When I got home, I drew them. I curled in that same corner of the couch and drew pigeons, mourning doves, starlings. C got me an ipad and I learned how to draw on it, so that I could better lose myself, zooming in and in on a wing, getting every feather just right. I read about them for hours, little bird facts, like the fact that a third of the population of pigeons dies yearly. I couldn’t think of anything else. Beyond the birds, there was nothing.

There was something – not comforting, exactly, but sunshakeable, factual, like a rock in the middle of the sea, about watching the birds. There were so many of them, and they lived rough, beautiful, horrible lives, and a lot of them died. Some of them hobbled through Union Station on one pink foot. Once I found a disembodied wing in the middle of the sidewalk. They flew one way, they flew another. They’d been doing this for a million years, and they’d do it for a million more. 

Most of us don’t make it, I thought, and the thought did not give me comfort, or satisfaction, but I couldn’t help touching it, again and again, like a talisman. Most of us don’t make it. 

Something had changed about how I viewed the universe. I didn’t see it as cruel, exactly, but vastly impersonal.

I figured out you could make little animations on the ipad and spent three days animating pigeons, scrunched into a permanent hunch over the screen, painstakingly getting the lines right. The result was a 3-second loop of two pigeons bobbing their heads on a windowsill. I sent it to one of my friends who’d gone to art school. It was almost exactly like that meme from Parks and Rec where Ben is like, “Could a depressed person make THIS?!” 

Instead of staging an intervention, my friend dropped by a day later with a bag of art supplies – the really good kind, like a real sketchpad and the nice pencils you get from the actual art store. When I texted him follow-up questions like “how do I draw shadows on my BIRDS?!” he really answered me in a detailed way. When I texted another friend videos of a woman who wears a headdress of birdseed to encourage birds to land on her face — concerning by any standard — my friend showed up a few days later with a lasagna, a bag of bird seed, and a hand-made version of the headdress she’d fashioned out of old glasses and painter’s tape.

In other words, those friends met me exactly where I was. They took me and the birds seriously. They didn’t laugh, or raise an eyebrow, or get nervous in the face of what was obviously an obsessive distraction from something that was threatening to drown me. Instead, they helped me watch and draw my birds. As long as I needed to.

Among all the memories of that season – much of which is a blur – that one still makes me cry, but a different kind of tears. The kind with a little gulp of hope. Maybe even gratitude.