The seasons change and I’m back in bed again. Propped up against the pillows, talking to my counsellor over Zoom. Or rather, listening to the space she has left for me, wondering how I might fill it with words. I don’t remember the last time I felt this low, this exhausted and frightened. So hollow I’m not sure I care much about anything anymore. I feel old ghosts stirring. I don’t know how much longer I can keep them penned in.
I look away from the screen. Stare out of the bedroom window. Eye contact is not exactly my strong point and, besides, the sycamore is waving at me. Tossing its top branches in a breeze whose rousing touch I’d like to feel on my skin. In bed, I inhale. Stale air. Sour with sweat.
The pause tips over. Into. Agony. An accusing silence, jeering. Louder even than the tinnitus that stings and sings in my ears. “FILL ME,” it mocks.
“So empty there are no words?”
“Pain so shameful you cannot admit it aloud?”
“Cat got your tongue?”
It’s hard to ignore the accusations. My volume control is turned up so loud, I’m shattered by the white noise of scorn. But out there, the wind is free. It blows me a gift…
Tumbling out of the sky like it’s fallen from heaven. Down behind my neighbours’ house, all forked tail and retracted wings, plunging. Bigger than my pain. I sit up and lean across the pillows to catch the red kite as it rises and passes the window, so close it almost fills the panes. It’s not finished. I want to know what’s caught its eye, what it covets so much that it comes round again, drops again. Then again. Five times in all. When it pulls up from the final plunge, circles the rooftops and disappears, I’ve no idea if it’s off for a lap of honour or to find its next meal.
As the drama unfolds, closer to the window than I have ever seen this huge raptor before, I’m narrating to my counsellor. I can’t help myself. I want her to see it too. To know what a privilege it is to witness this behaviour and feel the bird so nearby. She is watching me closely. I know she is, because I’m meeting her eye now, sharing my pleasure that something unexpectedly good has just happened.
And once I start talking, it is like a dam breaking. I tell her how important the birds outside my window are on the days I can’t get out of bed. I tell her about my birthday heron – the long-legged fish-spearing thunderbolt that brings me many happy returns. How rarely we see herons on the neighbours’ rooftop, only three or four times a year, but every winter for three years a heron has been waiting, poised impossibly tall when I’ve opened the curtains on my birthday morning. So reliable that last time my daughter was expecting it and came haring in to wake me. “Your birthday heron’s here Mummy, it’s here.”
My counsellor tells me how my face changes when I talk about birds. How they bring me alive. I could go on to explain how, one year, the children read to the rooftop heron out of the window from Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s spellbinding The Lost Words, replacing ‘weir’ with ‘window’, so in our version the bird rests ‘still still at windowsill’. Or how, on bad days, I measure the hours by swift flight and kite flight. How I listen as robin song becomes greenfinch, then blackbird, goldfinch and dunnock. How sparrows bicker beneath the bathroom window and wood pigeons roll past, bobbing gently on cooing waves.
But instead, I find myself talking about pain and dizziness. The fact that my legs won’t hold me, and all I want to do is sleep, except at night. About the way I am sure I’d rattle if someone shook me, a jangle of sleeping pills, painkillers and vitamins. I talk about anxiety and fear. I tell her how afraid I am that somewhere inside I am rotten, callous, broken and soon someone will find me out. I tell her how I pick over the words I say and write, how I worry them ragged to find evidence of my iniquity. I tell her how hard I am finding it right now, how tired I am of fighting, how close I am to despair.
She asks a question no one has dared ask me before. I’m not sure I can answer. But with the unspoken spoken, I feel a little lighter. A little less ashamed. Still sad, still stale. The air still still at windowsill. And yet I’ve remembered there is a life outside. Perhaps tomorrow I will sit in the garden for a few minutes. Or if not tomorrow, then sometime soon. And I think I know now what the red kite came down for. And I think it carried a little of it away.
