Empty Bird Cages

I am an honest man.

As such, it stands to reason that I'd do my best to speak honestly or else what would be the point? What purpose is served by a dishonest honest man? There's quite a bit of repetition in there but it doesn't bother me. I've done worse things and in time I'll do better. For now, I'm spending a Tuesday evening sitting on my deck wishing and waiting for better things and I wouldn't mind if they were delivered via overnight shipping.

Amazon is good at that kind of thing, I've heard. Perhaps I should've invested in a Prime membership and things would've wound up going a little more smoothly but I got scared off by the shipping so I decided to avoid happiness at all cost. It seemed like a good idea at the time and yet I can't help but feel like a man who dove into a bed of cacti for the same reason. If you don't understand the reference then I'd recommend you go watch "The Magnificent Seven", and by that I mean the classic with Charles Bronson, not the remade atrocity with Denzel Washington. 

It hurts to put "atrocity" and "Denzel" in the same sentence but such is life and I'm sitting on a damn cactus so why should one of our finest actors escape my ire?

Anyway.

Life has been difficult of late. Three days ago I was three weeks from going to the Grand Canyon for a vacation that has been two years in the making and today I had to cancel it. Or perhaps even worse was the fact that I didn't have to, I wanted to. You see, life hasn't been what it should be of late and to be perfectly truthful it's not always easy for me to be me. I live in a world of absolutes where there is either joy or pain, darkness or light, success or failure, and I always have. It usually works out and it has made me into who I am today but that's not to say that it's a perfect system. The downside is that there are times when those absolutes all swing the same way and when this happens, I can't cope with the mania that comes with too much of a good thing and I slip into deep trenches when it dips and drops into a trifecta of darkness, failure, and pain.

That might sound melodramatic but it's not. The simple fact of the matter is that I'm very much a hills and valleys type of person even though I live in a region of the United States that's never met a hill it didn't want to steamroll with the bland power of the Great Plains. The pleasant part of this is that I've never met a valley that didn't eventually climb into something greater but the fact remains that those lows need to be traversed for the inevitable hills to hold any worth.

That's what I like to tell myself, anyways. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.

This time around the Valley has gone on for three weeks. It started long before that due to a long stretch of creative infertility before tailing off into some unpleasant health problems and crashing into a mountain that represented some pretty lousy heartache. All these things are simple little tragedies, I know, and indeed it seems woefully shortsighted to call them tragedies at all, but they are tragic to me and I suppose that's what matters in these moments where they're felt and experienced by me. They gathered together like a storm in a tiny bottle and grew into thunderheads that brought with them a sadness I've rarely felt that might as well have been hurricanes. 

I found myself caving to emotion at the drop of a hat to such a deliriously odd extent that silence sent me spiraling as did any movie, song, or television show with even the slightest heartbreak heft. So I tried to hide from both and in doing so hid from everything else as well. That worked about as well as you could imagine and after almost two weeks of lifeless isolation I decided instead to surface and get lunch with my parents while skirting around the bigger picture and focusing on a trip I was less than two days from cancelling.

It helped and I left with the desire to write a story and buy a bird. 

I managed the latter but didn't come close to the former. The story stalled after seventeen words but the bird was still a bird, a little Zebra Finch of the sort that I've wanted since I was a child, and for a single day he made me happy until I returned him because the life I thought he'd bring to my apartment wasn't a life at all. I hadn't the money or the space to purchase him a friend and the cage they'd assured me was large enough for a solitary bird wasn't nearly big enough for a man who loves birds more than anything, and so the sounds of living things, the flutter of wings and a frequent chirp and song, became a constant reminder of the little finch that could only fly ten inches each way before little bars blocked his way. 

I knew then that the Grand Canyon wasn't meant to be. I knew it as soon as I realized that even the things I loved most weren't enough to make me smile and I couldn't bear the thought of visiting a site I've longed for my entire life only to feel the same sadness when I stood on the precipice of wonder. What is a view if I can't see flight? What is wonder if I can't hear song? 

So instead I returned my little bird friend, named Atticus because what better name exists for a Finch, and even though he'll probably wind up in another cage on another day, perhaps he'll live there with the friends and family I couldn't provide. Perhaps he can live in a little home where he can sing and his kin can sing back. And today I told my boss that I no longer needed a week off to see the Canyon, a notification accompanied by a joke that it will still be there next year or the year after that. That was the hardest part, I think. It felt like killing a dream even if only for the moment and I have so few dreams left that haven't yet died that I'm beginning to feel their losses a little more each time. Perhaps those losses will one day get to be too much, but perhaps they won't. 

Today they didn't. Even though I did tear up when I got home and heard nothing, even though I teared up with the understanding that I'll soon be another year older and not where I want to be, and even though I sometimes feel adrift in a very small world where I'm bumping into the walls of a cage I didn't even know was there, I'm still rather certain that those things will eventually fade like they always do. Then, when I'm ready to hear the sounds of flight and majesty, when I'm ready to see sights I can only dream of without the restrictions of whatever ghosts the heart can manage, I'd like to think that things will be different.

Perhaps I'll finally have my moment to stand on the precipice of greater adventures and canyonlands and think of how distant the stormcloud sadness has become.