The card is small, maybe four inches square, sturdy cardstock gone soft at the edges with age. Someone — she — drew a cat with wings and a long tail, sitting Buddha-like in front of a sun so large it consumed the entire background, a sun crowned with six flaming orange triangles, and eyes that watched everything. Five red birds, almost calligraphic, floated above that cat. She was seven, maybe eight. She gave this to me for my birthday.
I don’t remember receiving it. I remember her mother, and I remember her mother leaving, and I remember that leaving as one of several losses compressed into a single gut-wrenching year. The child I carried lightly, the way adults do when they tell themselves the kids will be fine. You find a thirty-year-old birthday card in a red pocket folder you’d forgotten existed and discover that lightness was a kind of lie you told yourself so you could fly.
She drew me a winged creature. I had drawn her mother one first — a starling, escaping through an open third floor apartment window into cobalt sky — though I didn’t know then that she’d seen it. I didn’t know until I opened this folder that she’d answered it.
That year I was finishing graduate school, entering the mental health field, losing my mother by degrees to her dying, and losing a girlfriend I cared for far more than her leaving suggested. Life had compressed itself into a series of thresholds I was crossing whether I was ready or not. I was in my own therapy then, writing more poetry than prose because poetry didn’t require me to make grammatical sense of things that had none.
The starling got into my studio apartment somehow. These things happen in divided-up old Pittsburgh mansions — a gap somewhere, a moment of poor judgment on the bird’s part, the ordinary chaos of city life. I came home to find it careening off walls, frantic, looking for the logic of outside in a cramped space that had none. It finally exhausted itself into the closet.
I grabbed a broom. I opened the window. I coaxed and flushed and waited, clumsy and persistent, until it found the framed wooden opening and was gone — into the green treetops, into the cobalt blue and the puffy white clouds, into whatever precarious life awaited it with its own kind.
The poem wrote itself. I made an ink and colored pencil drawing to go with it — the open window, the bird a black gesture against the sky above the green trees — and eventually turned it into a card I gave to my therapist and a few close people. Her mother was one of them.
I never thought about what a seven-year-old might make of a drawing like that. A bird flying out of a window, away. What that image might mean to a child watching the adults in her life come and go like weather.
