Status: complete
Dreamscape
Allegretto
Every morning I wake up to the sun and the sound of her voice in my ears, and I feel my heart swell and my chest puff until I am sure I will burst. I didn’t know that my body could contain such fierce affection. I am built for speed, for durability, I am built for hunting and escaping. I am built for the wind. Her heart is in the water, in the fish and small organisms that live there and teem at her feet. We are both set to separate currents, like clocks running at different speeds – but for these few weeks we move as one.
She has a mind that sparks and fizzes like a firefly, and I see it behind her dark eyes as she reads to me from her memory. She is sharp and bright and always laughing. She is steady. At dusk each night she takes me to a special place in the woods. She says humans came here, once, in the summer, and ate all her fish. They left behind a wad of paper that is covered in dark lines and shapes. Wirrar says it is called a book and it is full of stories. We, neither of us, can decipher the symbols, but we turn each piece of paper over deliberately, one by one, and make up our own.
Tonight, Wirrar tells a story about a big grey bird, a huge lumbering thing with enormous wings and yellow eyes that comes to her home, and envelops her in his feathers. He is strong and fast, she says, like the lightning. He takes her away to a frozen land where they live together in their own warm world. He is called Thowra. I pull her in, close.
We spend three weeks together in the sun and sky and water, just happily co-existing. Each day the temperature drops by another degree, but I ignore it. I am warm, with her. I ignore my flock and my responsibilities, I am wilfully at her disposal, I am drowning in her dark eyes. I love to watch her fish and hunt, to use her fast reflexes and to dip in to the water. We fly together, me circling above and her straight below, and together we survey her small world. Every ridge and tree tells a new story, and I carefully knot the pieces of her together in my mind so I can return to her like a map.
And yet, no matter how far we fly, we always return to the lake. She lands back in her current with a sigh, she spreads out like butter, she is home.
I have built a home with her here, a nest made up of a million quiet moments. Still I am feeling the frost come on, and I hear the restless pull of my flock. I have tried and tried to teach her the currents of the wind, but she grows tired too soon, she is buffeted across slips and streams.
Every Winter is colder than the last. Every nest gets left behind at the turn of the season.
She has a mind that sparks and fizzes like a firefly, and I see it behind her dark eyes as she reads to me from her memory. She is sharp and bright and always laughing. She is steady. At dusk each night she takes me to a special place in the woods. She says humans came here, once, in the summer, and ate all her fish. They left behind a wad of paper that is covered in dark lines and shapes. Wirrar says it is called a book and it is full of stories. We, neither of us, can decipher the symbols, but we turn each piece of paper over deliberately, one by one, and make up our own.
Tonight, Wirrar tells a story about a big grey bird, a huge lumbering thing with enormous wings and yellow eyes that comes to her home, and envelops her in his feathers. He is strong and fast, she says, like the lightning. He takes her away to a frozen land where they live together in their own warm world. He is called Thowra. I pull her in, close.
*
We spend three weeks together in the sun and sky and water, just happily co-existing. Each day the temperature drops by another degree, but I ignore it. I am warm, with her. I ignore my flock and my responsibilities, I am wilfully at her disposal, I am drowning in her dark eyes. I love to watch her fish and hunt, to use her fast reflexes and to dip in to the water. We fly together, me circling above and her straight below, and together we survey her small world. Every ridge and tree tells a new story, and I carefully knot the pieces of her together in my mind so I can return to her like a map.
And yet, no matter how far we fly, we always return to the lake. She lands back in her current with a sigh, she spreads out like butter, she is home.
I have built a home with her here, a nest made up of a million quiet moments. Still I am feeling the frost come on, and I hear the restless pull of my flock. I have tried and tried to teach her the currents of the wind, but she grows tired too soon, she is buffeted across slips and streams.
Every Winter is colder than the last. Every nest gets left behind at the turn of the season.