the bird with monsters in its head

if you think this is going to be scary, it’s not. it’s sad and maybe a little more than relatable.

there’s a bird, as small as my palm and it always visits the cable in front of my window like a ritual. nobody could tell it had monsters inside its head, but i did because i noticed it a little longer than necessary. they were not the scary kind, definitely not visible from the outside. from a distance, the bird looked like nothing out of place - feathers neat, eyes wandering, wings tucked with delicate precision. it always followed a pattern, like perching at the same spot like it had everything memorized. and meanwhile it learnt the shape of familiarity and black clouds.

this bird in particular always had loneliness surrounding it in volumes, never allowing itself to get too close to any other avian nor human. it sang when everything went silent, i almost never saw him having food or having the curiosity of its surroundings like any other bird. it just existed, without purpose, almost too lifeless. a little scared most times but never enough to give up completely.

i always wondered what is wrong with it. did it lose someone? did someone break its little heart? did it get bullied? or maybe it is just existing with silent monsters inside its head, never letting him feel half as full of life. in all these months i have lived in this house, i have never seen it sing in daytime, it somehow squeaks a little at night-time, and no it’s not a nocturnal species by what i can tell. and is it so wrong of me to assume that something is wrong with this bird, because at this point i am just personifying this a little too much. to the point that i may have envisioning myself as that bird.

isn’t it familiar to you, like, how we often tend to see the world the way we see ourselves and feel like its just a mirror of our own reflection. finding similarities in things around me comforts me emotionally, if i can’t comprehend something logically.

and how am i supposed to explain it to someone? like, ‘oh, there’s a bird and it has monsters in its head. but you won’t guess it at first you know. it looks calm. settled. like it knows exactly where it belongs. it perches. it watches. it waits its turn with the wind. but inside? something is always moving.’ the way it always flies away to nowhere when some other bird comes and shares the same cable to perch upon. the way it is always intimidated by something, either around or within. and don’t we as humans tend to run away too, when something is very messed up within us? if finding an explanation isn’t helping, maybe finding an escape will.

wasn’t this strangely familiar to human behaviour? like someone who drifts away, someone who needs space without warning, or someone who loves deeply but disappears occasionally. the demons inside constantly make it too hard to live, and i feel that bird so much. i absolutely hope i am wrong in concluding but i always feel sad when i think of this somehow. humans fly away when life gets too tight, when expectations pile up or when familiar spaces of fear start echoing too loudly. sometimes, we don’t know what we are running away from or running towards, but the process feels comforting. and when we don return, nothing has changed, and the patterns repeat. we isolate, we disappear for a while, then come back and it all repeats. before you know it, it’s all already in a loop.

is this how monsters in adulthood look like? is this what fear of dark rooms feel like? the bird isn’t lost, it’s atleast honest. honest about the noise it carries within it and it perhaps knows when to leave when it starts hurting. we can all leave and return to somewhere, nothing needs to be abandoned completely in the name of finding solace.

i feel most times, silence heals you more than answers, or maybe why we love deeply but in intervals. you are not strange, you are just carrying monsters and wings in the same body. and for the time being i will still continue to keep looking at the bird on the cable near my window, i don’t know though what makes it keep coming back to the same hurt when it can just fly away anywhere and find a new home. or maybe the world has been too cruel and this is the only place he feels safe while he keeps carrying monsters inside his head.