It’s been a while since I really saved something. I know I’m not a superhero. I don’t wear a cape or a mask and venture out into the night to rescue those who cannot save themselves.
I do my saving like any other mother does: I check the best by-date on our milk, make sure the seatbelts are safely fastened when we take the car, hold little hands at crossroads and traffic lights, warn of the dangers of not washing your hands properly after a toilet visit. Most days I’m not a hero or a villain. Most days, I’m just trying.
Yet last weekend had me feeling like the villain: The perpetrator exploding in a fit of rage in front of innocent bystanders. I don’t like villains. Not even the multilayered ones. I have trouble forgiving them.
It’s a terribly hot day, and all I can think is how I can’t show up at my dentist’s appointment with tears streaming down my face. I need to have my crown fixed, not get a referral to a therapist. It’s hard not to cry though, thinking about the aforementioned weekend and all the ways I disappointed myself as a mother.
This is what happens when you listen to sad music, or happy music, or any music that tugs at the heartstrings for that matter. Joy turns into pain so easily. It’s like the two are best buds, placed next to each other in some deep part of my brain. Those bastards never go anywhere alone. The slightest nudge will take me from smiling to crying in a split second. The same way I welcome making weird connections when writing poetry, I also cause myself even weirder emotional ones when seemingly everything is fine, and then end up a red, snotty mess while picking out tomatoes at the market, doing the dishes, or browsing TK Maxx for kitchen utensils. Isn’t that how everyone does adulting?
Most days I can manage to forget my life’s greatest fear and the pain accompanying it–namely that the moment will come, when I won’t be able to save the ones closest to me. That the future is a one-way street down the same dead (pun intended) end for all of us.
Sure I can make the way there as colorful, delightful and interesting as possible. But what about the ones I lead? The ones depending on me, always. Those who will never be able to read the signs, or know not to cross the highway. The ones who need help with discerning left from right, who think the cars driving past them are just toys and not machines with the potential to destroy them any given minute?
Most days, I pretend like the dead-end is something that will happen in a galaxy far, far away from this one. Something that doesn’t concern the now-me. That’s future-me’s business and I don’t know that lady. All I can influence is the minutes and hours ahead of me. The day I inhabit at the moment.
So I inhabit the shit out of that tidal wave of sorrow that tsunamied its way over my now-walking ass to the dentist’s office, and try to calm enough down to be able to discern the path in front of me. That’s when I see it: a little brown speck of a creature, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes closed to the world around it, unmoving. I stand for a second observing it. If it weren’t for the fact that it was upright, it could pass for dead already.
I lean down to grab it, prepared to be met with its frantic flight, yet pick it up without any trouble. It just lets itself be carried off into the unknown, that’s when I know it is more on its way there than here.
I’m not a bird person. I don’t emotionally connect with birds. I think of them as tiny dinosaurs which have evolved enough to not be able to eat me. That’s as far as it goes. Yet in the moment I pick that little thing up, nothing feels more urgent or important to me, than to save it.
Time is counting backwards: 20 minutes until my crown fixing appointment and I am holding my saving grace in my hands. Water, I think, it must be dying of thirst. So I rush to the first store I find (a Döner Kebap place) holding the sparrow in my hand and ask for a cup of life. I don’t blame the guy behind the counter for looking at me like he did. I can only imagine my swollen face in combination with the flying thing in my hand, reading like a flashing warning sign in neon letters: CRAZY! He nevertheless gives me the water and I walk outside, spilling half of it on my way there.
I place the little paper plate on a bench and urge the sparrow to drink. Nothing. I place the sparrow on the plate with the water. Nichts. I dampen its little head with some drops with my finger. Nada. At some point during this miserable attempt to revive it, the bird opens its eyes and sees me trying to save it. The sight jumpstarts all the survival mechanisms the bird can still use and it flies away, towards a dried-out bush a meter away. Its fleeing attempt is as miserable as my rescue one. At that moment I know there is nothing to be done.
I stand there for a few minutes, willing the sparrow to fly back to the water plate, but it doesn’t move. I’m running out of time and the bird is in the bush and the sun is scorching hot and the bush offers no shelter and my head hurts from the crying and the dentist is waiting and I need to get going.
I turn my back to the bird and walk the last couple of meters to the sterile white office where joy goes to die. I have a knot in my throat almost completely clogging my airway. I think of the sparrow alone in that bush, I know it won’t be long before a cat catches it, or a car squashes it, or the sun takes its sweet time drying it from the inside out. And yet. There is nothing to be done.
The future-me is staring back reflected on the dentist’s office glass doors.
The door buzzes, begging me to open it.
I swallow and push until I’m on the other side of this hell.
I love this piece, Elisa. Some days we are just trying and that’s enough ❤️