Going on Walks.
I realized the other day that maybe I have a small fear of birds. I love a bird in the sky, and even once had a hawk land on my balcony and stare at me for what had to be at least ten minutes. (I took this as an unmistakable sign of something, even if I still haven’t figured out what it could mean.) I love birds flying in V-formation, something one of my high school teachers taught us about and that’s stuck with me ever since—the synchronization and collaboration of birds flying as one, moving forward and looking out for each other at the same time. I have a tattoo of a dove on my arm—a leftover remnant of my religious days but one that I still like for the hope it symbolizes. The idea that when you’re lost at sea, you might send out feelers for how much longer it will go on and have that feeler come back with something alive and sturdy in hand that lets you know you’re almost there.
What I’m trying to say is I like birds when they are symbolic or far away, but less when they are in attacking distance. Last summer, I was in South Carolina for a class, and me and my classmates were sitting on a dock, and this seagull kept swooping down like right above our heads to say hi or something, I don’t know. And the more it swooped, the more restless I became because how many times would it swoop before it opened its mouth and tried to take a piece of us back with it?
I felt that same restlesness the other day when I was taking a walk around my neighborhood. I was just walking, minding my business, when I came across this massive crow sitting on a telephone line. And it was cawing over and over again, and nearby unseen other crows were cawing back, and I swear it was looking at me, and I thought, Any second it’ll swoop down and attack. (My brother told me that crows are actually very smart and that they do indeed talk about people, can remember people they’ve seen before.)
So I was crouched down, hands over my head, as I ran past this brilliant crow, and while doing that, I realized that maybe my minor bird phobia comes from watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Birds as a kid. I saw birds mercilessly attack people when I was young enough to not really understand the difference between real and imaginary, and now sometimes that same slippage comes up again when faced with a close by bird. I think what else could happen now but an attack? How else could the story go on?
Often, the story goes on without any bird swooping down, claws ready. I walk around the neighborhood, around the park, around the city, and the animals around me mind their business while I mind mine. It’s nice to be in the quiet, especially during this time of year when classes are ramping up and my energy is dwindling, when it’s cold and dark and all I want to do is absolutely nothing and yet my work load requires more bustle than ever. My impulse is to cocoon, but I’ve found that walking wakes me up a little, brings me back to the land of the living.
I’ve been walking around my neighborhood more to justify my new tennis shoes, and I’ve walked enough now that I know which corner has the dog that runs out without a leash and where the seemingly abandoned truck is with all the stickers on the windows. I know where the giant hill is and where to turn to make my way back to my apartment. As someone who is generally pretty direction-challenged and can rarely make my way to places without Google Maps, this spatial knowledge is something new for me, something I’m proud to now have in my back pocket.
Walking (or any kind of exercise really—stay tuned maybe for a post on my stationary bike) makes me feel like I have some agency in these days as they zoom by, hurtling us into 2024 (how?). I want to keep walking, arms pumping, head held high, even as I brace myself for the inevitable moment when a bird, mistaking my locs for French fries, carries me off into the sky.
