I couldn’t remember if I had ever held a creature in my hands as it took its last breath. Here was this broken bird, legs twitching and tiny eyes filled with pain and fear. How does pain feel in a soft gray body in the pit of my palm? I hated my cat for only partially murdering the bird, and I kept asking Yuji, “Do we really have to kill it?”
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A new friend recently described a dance performance as a series of flocking movements, and I couldn’t discern what I loved most: the word “flocking,” the image of humans flocking and spreading across a concrete floor, or her elegant hand gestures and long slender fingers.
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I petted the finch’s fine yellow wings and its downy gray breast, marveling stupidly at nature’s attention to detail. How can feathers be so, so small? Its broken legs looked more like wire coated in plastic than skin over hollow bone.
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When I was sixteen I got grounded for reeking of vodka, after a night at an under-18 club on Sunset Boulevard called Seduction. I was wearing an olive green shirt as a dress with no bra, and felt self-conscious about my broad shoulders because it was swim season. My friends and I poured cheap vodka into our Diet Cokes at the Del Taco across the street and cackled and talked about how we hoped we’d make out with cute soccer players that night. I didn’t have high hopes, and I also didn’t say I’d prefer to just hang out at Del Taco with my hilarious and super hot friends, admiring their strong thighs and bare arms and lewd jokes. I was experiencing what my therapist would later identify as BUFU: do I want to be you, or do I want to fuck you?
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Yuji brought out the shovel. I was already twenty minutes late to work but wanted to stay and wait. We decided we’d bury it under the lemon tree. I kneeled in the dirt with the bird quivering in my hands and it started clicking its beak together, looking at me as if it were waking up from a nap with a lot to say. Its voice was gone, but it communicated something as it passed over the edge. I felt its body sigh in my hands, and I was grateful that its eyes closed naturally. My eyes were watering and I touched its belly and laid it in the damp hole and said goodbye and went to work.
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My dad was really pissed when I got in the car. I apologized and didn’t know if I felt like the night was worth the trouble, but I was grateful to be wearing pants again. It’s hard to feel like an apology means anything when you can’t undo being drunk in the moment. The next morning I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s in bed and quietly enjoyed not being allowed to use electronics or talk to my friends.
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When I was a kid, my dad would bring me with him to his office near the Ballona Wetlands. I would draw animals and fax them to my mom, and sometimes I’d get to play this shuffleboard computer game called Shufflepuck Café. I loved the gritty black and white aesthetic and the creepy little characters that would say, “Heh heh, nice SHOT!” On our way home, we’d stop by the wetlands and tromp around the brown marsh that stretched west of the highway and was starting to get hedged in by ugly beige developments. Dad would look for white egrets and blue herons, both so delicate and special and striking in their muddy world, like the last red leaves on a spidery tree in late November.
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The morning I was grounded, Dad called me from my bed into the backyard to look at something. I obeyed with unease, and found him standing tall under the guava tree, staring down at something on the ground. As I got closer, I saw that there was a tiny dying bird, shaking on the asphalt. “It’s a hummingbird,” he said. My dad loves hummingbirds. We both stood in fraught silence, high above the struggling bird. I wanted to look closely at its feathers in the light and scoop it up so that it could be held for its last pained moments, but there was no space for tenderness so close to my dad’s anger. I wanted to apologize for disappointing him and say I knew everything I’d done was stupid, that I just wanted to be with my friends, that I thought I was very gay, that I was still safe and young and his weird, shy tomboy daughter, but I didn’t feel that there was space for any of that, either. I waited until the bird died and muttered, “That was really sad,” then walked back into the house.
