2.1
Text and Design by SiSix
Do you ever just stop, mid-scroll, and think,
wait, am I even alive? For real alive?
That weird snap where you clock your own body, the left knee that won’t stop aching, the tiny grief for a cactus called José, and then a song from playslist Road Trip with Lara and Max 2018 comes on and suddenly you’re back there, in a car you can still smell, in a moment you didn’t know you were saving.
There's light when you wake up, and there’s also wind - if you’re lucky a spring wind, not precisely cold but just cool enough to be enjoyed while bathing in the sun.
And somewhere, a gardener is starting a TikTok channel about types of grass, and a 45-year-old woman is giving birth to a left-handed baby (after loads of injections).
There’s really so much going on but one of the things that blows my mind the most is this: BIRDS.
Not in the David Attenborough way, though I love him, I do - but I mean birds. I don’t mean a glance, not “oh look, a robin,” but watch a bird! Until your worries slip out of your mind like, until the gas bill becomes just paper, or until you forget Sunday lunch at your mom’s and that thing you said to your brother, the one who once described capitalism as “elegant” and calls women “females”.
The way his face tightened, the silence that followed.
Mom was blinking three times faster than usual.
...
Yes, all of it blurs because there’s only this small body of festive feathers, diving into puddles like it’s the Met Gala.
Birds!
A miracle that changes its mind seventeen times about a single crumb: chaotic, majestic, but also, they obviously know what they’re doing.
People say it all the time: birds are smart. Crows remember your face and hold grudges like they’ve got diaries. Parrots know sixty words, maybe more. But I wonder if anyone actually sits with the idea of BIRDS.
And yes, I know what they say about bird lovers. There was even a study at some royal college, a place called Essex, which sounds like fog and heavy curtains. They were trying to find the most boring hobbies in the world, as if boredom was a measurable thing. Birdwatching was there, of course, alongside sleeping, religion, television, and numbers that try to explain the infinite (aka mathematics).
They said that those who watch birds are among the dullest people alive, but let me tell you, I'm not boring! I'm actually quite sexy - I’ve been told, once, by someone who may or may not have been stoned, but still - it was said. And said things count in this economy. Oh, and they had good taste too; they wore rings.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that birdwatching isn’t something for boring people. Not really.
There’s this one bird, a small red one, I saw once in the Atlantic Forest while visiting my surfer friend. It flew from the branches of a tall tree to the edge of the surfer’s porch. His mother, who was also visiting, often leaves food out for it in a small container. Not for the surfer. For the bird. Just to see it while hiding behind the 90s-patterned curtains.
And maybe that’s what life is.
Just the chance to see a red bird.
These birds carry seeds in their beaks like little secrets. They drop them where they shouldn’t, and whole forests appear. Forests with paths, bugs, shadows, and moss that remember who you were in 2003.
This bird isn’t interested in being majestic. It does not need such illusions. It sings because it can, it glides because the wind is there, it owes no rent to the sky. It has written nothing about itself; no manifestos, no pleas, no justifications.
And when it flies, it's not a spectacle, it's a lesson. A quiet rebuke to everything we’ve come to accept as unchangeable.
We were told some things are not possible, but the bird says otherwise. Its flight is a kind of resistance, a refusal to be named by gravity, a soft declaration that something else is always possible.
