Anniversaries are tricky things for me.
I do not particularly like celebrating them, because I feel that the recognizing of things like birthdays and national holidays is a futile attempt to retain some trace of a past that may or may not have once been a present, and is not anymore, and which will become further distanced from the reality of the present with each anniversary that I needlessly celebrate.
Some anniversaries, however, are unavoidable, such as the day that my grandfather died, the day that I realized I would never be famous, the day that I first told a girl that I loved her (it was a lie), the day that my brother took his first steps and the day that I came to the recognition that the reality I am living is sometimes much different than the reality I like to imagine I am living.
It was one year ago that I realized what love is and what love is not, what it means to fall in love and what it means to be merely infatuated, because it was one year ago that I died to myself.
It was one year ago that I found the body of a bird beneath a tree in my grandparents' backyard and stood over it for what seemed like hours, knowing that I should bury it, but also wondering why something was holding me back from doing what I knew I had to.
I remember the exact way that I felt as I returned from burying it. I remember opening the screen door and walking through the living room with my head down so that no one would see that I was weeping.
I do not know why it was such a challenge for me to fight my sorrow for the suffering of that bird, because I am not the kind of person who becomes overcome by visible emotion.
I am not a man afraid of terrorists or criminals who have escaped from prison. I am afraid of looking back on my life as an old man and coming to the heartbreaking realization that I forgot to record the date that I told so-and-so that I did not love her anymore, or that I forgot to send someone a thank you note for the graduation gift that he or she gave me when I graduated high school.
I think that birds are painful for me to look at because they remind me of the Saturday morning that I was sitting in the kitchen when my mother came in with the telephone and told me that my grandfather had died. When she told me that, I remember seeing a bird pass by outside of the window; I saw it out of the corner of my eye.
The evening that I looked across the street while sitting on the porch and saw my childhood crush making out with my best friend is a painful memory as well, not so much because it was a signal to me that my dreams of my childhood crush were forever shattered, but more because the sight of a bird passing by in the distance at that exact moment burns in my mind to this very day.
I went to bed that night wondering why the bird in my line of sight was more disturbing than the loss of the only girl I had ever really loved. I do not know the answer.
My mind is fully saturated with memories of life, fear, death, birds, blasphemy and various inventions, but none of these memories mean as much to me as the memory of the events that never occurred, and I believe that this is why birds have such tragic connotations for me.
Birds are the symbols of the life I have attempted to make for myself, the symbols of my attempts to build significance out of insignificance and to extract meaning from the mundane aspects of life that were never meant to hold any sort of intrinsic or extrinsic worth whatsoever.
When I buried that bird I realized that love was something I did not believe in, or something that I would ever be able to believe in, because no well-meaning person would psychologically bury a thing that he or she loved if there was still hope for it to improve his or her life in a significant fashion.
I am a writer, nothing more and nothing less. I feel an inherent need to record everything that occurs to me or that does not occur to me, not by the years during which they occurred, but by meaningless symbols that serve as a mechanism of distance between myself and the things that I try to make of myself.
It is so odd to me how the recognitions of dead things from my past that used to be alive remind me of so many other things that are so disconnected from everything else in so many ways, but which are also completely connected in their universality of grief it is impossible to escape them. I cannot escape the grief of past tragedies, but at the same time, I wonder if I even would want to escape that grief if I had the opportunity.
Sometimes when I am typing, I see an image of a bird form out of the letters and words on the screen. I swear I never meant any trouble by constructing my past.
