She lay like fallen leaves. As if a breeze brushed them, her wings fluttered odd angles; and I watched them reach for my breath, through the glass she thought was air.

The sound of her impact had stopped my work. Odd sound: where had I heard it before…?

…?

Oh… ?  Oh… oh, no: the unexpected crush of accident, as the sound of two cars colliding at some distance, muffled by the safe walls and windows of your home. Muffled by the fog of trauma, an uneasiness slowly rises in the heart; it becomes urgent as the memory becomes clear.

Glancing through the window beside me I saw nothing. Feeling that “wrongness” in the air, standing, and turning then, on the deck beyond the sliding doors, I saw her out of place, small body fibrillating as though electrocuted, her chest fluttering deeply, and too quickly.

The truth of relationship is a constant between living creatures: I knew that, as soon as I touched her, I would become responsible for her. If I chose to intervene, I may be choosing a future I did not like. Was she broken? Would I lay her in a shoe-box shelter to wait for her death? I couldn’t move her – what if her neck were broken?

I guess decision takes place in feeling, not in thought, and at the speed of light. The physics of solid objects slows to a standstill, until a moment stretches, and time is meaningless. Here is what a moment noticed:

… her eye was clear, but blinking. Her eye moved. She knew I was there.
… it had begun to rain. The planking was wet.
… the trees were hunched over, and there was no wind to lift them.
… behind me, someone sent a message to me on the computer. I ignored it.
… her body was rigid, vibrating, but her eye moved, blinked. Closed.
… my feet were cold. The glass was colder, and my breath made a small cloud against it.
… her eye seemed alive, opened, slowly closed as if sleeping.
… it had begun to rain.

That is what moved me. To be dying, alone, in the rain? With no last touch but cloud-water to steal your heat?

I slid the door open and leaned out into the weather, placing one hand around and above her, sheltering her from the rain and the chill, close enough to her chest I could feel the heat of her body escaping, or her warmth meeting my warmth. I could feel the rapid tap of her heart flickering at my palm. I spoke quietly. How do you soothe a bird. I spoke to her like a hurt child. I was speaking to the end of her life.

I placed my other hand behind her, caressing her head softly, as slight as a tuft of cotton. The rain fell gently, touching my shirt and shoulders. Her eyelids fluttered closed. Then they opened. They they closed. I thought: having chosen, who knows how long I might be here?

There is a point where the ego finally tips, and spills, and slips away. There is a point where your small aches and needs are no longer of the same magnitude as another’s, when the twisting colors and confusing arguments that once seemed so urgent are suddenly exposed as ridiculous. It is such a poignant lesson. A bird had flown into my glass, and was dying in my hands; I held its fluttering life between my palms as it seeped away. Even the weight of that thought dissipated: I simply held warm hands around its life, as the rain fell more heavily on my back and head. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get a coat. I held my hands around her, because I held my hands around her.

~

A few minutes passed. Something changed. I couldn’t see it: I felt it. Her head relaxed and may have shifted toward the earth. Her eye opened wide and, though I couldn’t discern a pupil in that dark bead, I saw it move one way and then another… and then,

… and then!

… her eye suddenly came into focus! She turned her head and looked right at me, almost as though her spirit, which had fled, and flown back to that little body, and taken up residence again! Her wings tightened against her body, there inside the cradle of my hands. I felt her quicken in my palms, and her small claws clutched the soft skin inside of my hand.

I turned my palm skyward. She twisted her body and stood, upright, in my hand, light as tinder. She tried a wing-beat. Then, with the dull thrill of purring cloth, she flew!!

My held breath exploded with an AH!! and the rain came down, the rain came down from the empty sky and washed my eyes.

photo credit: David Bowman, http://bowmandavid.deviantart.com/art/Fallen-Bird-169057543

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