Sparrows

I can tell you how I floss, how I grind my jaw when I sleep, how I press spoons full of peanut butter upside down on my tongue. I can tell you why I have ulcers on my gums and callouses the size of quarters on both big toes. I can tell you that my logic curled up like the corners of burned books and died, but I can’t tell you why. Chewing on electrical cords as a child, maybe that did it; or maybe normalcy splattered like blown wax as I painted my hands with decapitated dandelions. I can tell you about the trapdoor I fell through on a fall afternoon when my mother sat me down on rough cement and told me my best friend was shot dead, and that that trapdoor swung open four more times before high school was out. These trapdoors are the ink flicked across my cerebellum, and when I was seventeen, I stopped trying to scrub it off.

The sparrow bracelet is silver and suspended. I scrounged it from a box I hadn’t opened in a year and fastened it at the junction of my wrist with its faded cord and ridged tail. A week before was the fifth trapdoor; his name was Matt, and he had been fifteen when they found his body by a lake. My knees had smacked the floor when my friend told me from six hours away, and I can’t tell you why I still pray Oh Jesus Please from so far away, but I do. I had read three months before that sparrows were the collectors of lost souls, and I had spent twenty times as long trying to forget how many lost souls were sutured into my life. I didn’t want to remember the popping veins and red eyes and the scabs that puckered friends’ skin, but I did, and I didn’t want to remember that, without them, I would have had the same. They sculpted my fourteen-year-old psyche, and, three years later, my eyelids were still pinned, open and vulnerable.

Since Matt died, I have kept the sparrow clasped on my wrist, warmed by the pulse I owe to the people it collects. I can tell you that lost souls are like candles whose heat wrap around elbows and knuckles after the wind takes them. Sometimes, when I can watch my breath wind and the stars dangle close, I know lost souls were too alive to be contained by thin skin. I have learned to fly because they fell, to see because their eyelids shut, to scribble their stories because their fingers have gone cold. Some nights, I wonder if I am a sparrow too, learning from a thistle nest what can happen if I do not spread my wings soon. Until I do, I know nothing is absolute; nothing but the truth that we are spirits in bodies, words behind teeth, and life tethered to reality.