Birdsong

Maya knows why some of us sing. Our tongues flap with bitter rage of longed-for things from in our cage where freedom taunts us with our wants and stands above us laughing. But how peculiar it is to find our cages have no doors and our feet no tethers. Then why are we so angry? And why are we so sad? I wonder if we, free to soar and celebrate, find solace in our cage, addicted to the drug of complaint and the cold embrace of confinement. The average adult has nearly 30,000 words at their command and exponentially more ways to combine them to complain about the coffee and the coworker, the boyfriend and the boss, the weather and the wife. A bird shrieks monotonously above my head, and I wonder whether she too can’t get over the trauma of this life without telling the dawn sky and a middle-aged white man about it. How strange that we find so few things to applaud and few ears willing to entertain them when we do. My cat stretches beside me and vocalizes as she hops down to see my wife, still sleeping in the bedroom, as if to say, “Oh yeah, there are two of you. Be back in a bit.” The simplicity of non-human communication is touted as a hinderance to thought or as evidence against intelligence. Research suggests that ruminating on negativity perpetuates and exacerbates it, but we re-live those injustices with each story we tell. Are we really the smart ones? Do we really want our freedom?