The Blue Bird.

I see her every day, I’m not sure if she recognizes me because every person stands in front of her cell giving her something to eat, trying to talk to her even though they realize that she cannot understand them. For her I’m just a part of this crowd, for her, I’m the person who crosses her cell multiple times a day without engaging with her. I wonder if she ever notices me!

From the last few days, I’ve started to engage with her as well, Next to her cell is a small transparent plastic container filled with pumpkin seeds, While crossing I’ve seen people stand there and pick one seed and crack open the shell to feed it to her, So, I stand there trying to interact with her, I start whistling in a low frequency which sounds like a bird’s chirp, I don’t know if it means anything to her but she makes a chirping sound, way more pleasant than the sound coming out from my mouth. I never feed her though, because I’m too paranoid that the seed might get stuck in her throat. I’ve been doing this for a few days now, I think she has started to recognize me, when she sees me coming she grabs the bars of her cells and tries to push her head out from the space between the bars.

I wonder what’s her day like, for most part of the day there are people in front of her cell trying to engage with her, but what happens when there’s no one. I think she tries to communicate with the other birds that are not imprisoned, when they come in sit in front of her cell, do they make her feel inferior because she’s been ripped apart from the thing she was born to do, fly. If not, then does she tell them to find a way to help her escape her cell, do they even speak the same language, because as humans we have a lot of languages, different interpretations of the same word, we all speak with a different dialect. Like us, birds also migrate from their homes to different parts of the world, and can it be that a bird from Germany can’t communicate with a bird from Nepal. If I assume that chirping is universally the same, does the bird in the cell ask them to bring her food, and what happens when the bird outside fly off and she’s then again left alone with a creature who creates unpleasant sounds with his mouth while standing in front of her cell.

But yesterday something happened, I was standing in front of her cell making sounds but this time she was not chirping, she was squeaking in high frequency and was jumping from one wall to another inside the cage, I thought maybe she’s happy today. I stood there for some more time, now she’s latched onto the bars of the cell and is moving her head upside down, I started to move away from her cell, she started to squeak more, It felt like she was calling me back, it felt that she was trying to tell me something. I came back and stood there, she was moving her head up and down, and then for a second she looked in my eye and then again repeated the process, Now, I’ve understood she’s definitely trying to communicate something. I saw her, I saw the cage and I saw the latch of the cage. With all the innocence and hope in the world, she was telling me how to open the latch of her cage, so that she can fly out. She must have seen the master open the latch multiple time, she learned it and was teaching me the process to open the latch because she thought that maybe I won’t be like her master. She wanted me to set her free, she wanted to fly, but I hesitated to open the latch, I went in search of her master and when I found him, I looked into his eyes and asked him, Can we let her go? he refused and said she’s not capable to survive out there now because she was born in a cell and has spent her entire life there, she’s not meant to be out in nature.

I was going back, I crossed her cell and couldn’t look her in the eye, I could see her from the corner of my eye and saw that she was facing me and still doing that action and was squeaking more loudly.

I couldn’t set the Blue Bird free, and she will never know why.