The Bird Appears

I didn’t hear her. I felt her.

Like something shifted in the air. Like someone opened a window inside my ribs and the wind rushed in, uninvited. My eyes weren’t even looking for her, they were just... pulled. Like gravity had grown hands.

She was sitting under the broken streetlight outside the laundromat. Legs pulled up. Hoodie sleeves hiding her hands. Drawing in a notebook that looked older than God. The way her hair fell in her face made it hard to see her clearly, but it didn’t matter. I saw enough. I saw everything.

She didn’t glow. She wasn’t loud. But something about her made the world go quiet. The first thought I had wasn’t she’s beautiful. It was worse. It was: "She’s mine."

I didn’t even know her name. But I already hated the idea that someone else might. She looked like someone who wasn’t used to being seen. And I… I’m the kind of person who only falls for what doesn’t want to be touched.

I watched her for too long. Long enough to learn the rhythm of her pencil. Long enough to imagine what it’d feel like to unzip her silence and climb inside.

You think that’s love? No. That’s need. That’s emptiness trying to fill itself with someone else’s softness. She didn’t look up. She didn’t notice me.

But I felt like I’d already met her in dreams I forgot how to wake from. Like her face was the answer to every question I never asked out loud. Like her stillness had teeth, and I wanted to put my hand in her mouth just to see if she'd bite.

She shifted. Crossed her legs the other way. A small thing. But it shattered something in me. I imagined sitting next to her. I imagined brushing against her on accident. I imagined her looking at me and smiling like she knew. Like she had been waiting. Like we were already a tragedy, just waiting to happen.

But I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just stood there like a broken clock, watching a girl who hadn’t even noticed the storm she’d pulled into orbit.

I didn’t fall in love. I fell into hunger. And I named her. Quietly. To myself.

The Bird.

Because she looked like something I could never hold properly. And still, I swore I would try.

Even if it meant bruising my own hands in the process. Even if it meant bending myself into whatever shape she might need, or worse, whatever shape I thought she might want. Even if it meant pretending not to care while setting every part of me on fire just to keep her warm.

I stood there, still half-hidden, watching her like I was watching some rare, impossible thing. And a sick part of me thought, maybe I could deserve her, if I just stayed quiet enough. If I just watched long enough. If I wanted her deeply enough, painfully enough, like love was a test and suffering made me holy.

She scratched something onto her page with a broken pencil. I wanted to be the page. I wanted her hands on me, even if it meant being torn, crossed out, rewritten.

And right then, standing under that broken streetlight, I promised myself something:

" If she ever looked at me, really looked... i’d never let her go."

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