When you’re older…

Nothing seems to quite make sense as is. I can’t seem to remember a time when I didn’t look upon the precedent year laughing at how much of a kid I was then, only for the same to happen when I’m a year older, laughing at one I laughed at that, when I was still a kid then. I was going through my stuff when I found my old diary, my first one, when I was almost 11 years old. First entry was about something I had absolutely no recollection of. I can’t seem to remember anything before I was 14 for that matter, so it was a blinding surge of anamnesis. A bird, specifically a wild finch, had flown into the house by mistake. As an 11-year-old by nature I became  emotionally attached to it in an instant, I didn’t want to let it go. I clung to its fidgety mass and racy heart beats, overlooking its own discomfort because I wanted to hang on to it, keep it. The dilemma here is, for anyone who’s familiar with pets, if the creature is wild, if it was born free, it cannot survive in captivity. That day, we kept it in a little cage and dad took me out on a long walk. Next morning he gave me a book, I don’t remember what it is now, I didn’t write its title, and got me to read a passage. It took some time to work through it, but it was about how sometimes when you love something you have to let it go, because you can’t be selfish. I wrote how he’d talked to me, in that way dads talk to their little girls, in that childish simplified language and theatrical intonations. “How would you feel like, if you were free and happy, flying here and there, living on the edge, day in day out in complete and utter freedom, then somehow someone takes that away from you. That someone loves you, wants you to be safe, gives you food and drink, no bigger birds can pick on you and you don’t have to worry whether you’ll live or die the next day. Wouldn’t you miss how free you were? When your entire life you’re used to spreading those wings and flapping them so vigorously you could hardly breathe, then in a matter of days you can’t extend them because the cage is too small. You can see that tree but you can’t go out and play with your other bird buddies, you have food and drink but you’re not that hungry anymore, as much as you’re hungry for that tree.” I remember reading the passage again and again looking for loopholes, but all I could think of is being that bird, and holding on to him didn’t sound that gratifying anymore. I knew I ’d be happy to keep it but it wouldn’t be happy to be kept. An hour later, I went to let it go, only to find that it had died. Not of malnourishment, not of abuse, but because it had tried so hard to get out that it hurt itself and broke its neck. I never felt so selfish in my entire life.

If you overlook the sappy tinge to that story, you’ll see that the melodrama is quite relatable. How many times do you hang on to people and feed off them when you know, deep down, they don’t want you to be there? That they’d feel better if you’d let them go once and for all? Wouldn’t it have been better if you’d fed it and let it go?