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A bird shows up on my windowsill, shaggy-looking like it’s been sleeping rough lately.
What’s happened to you, my friend? I ask the air. An echo returns, laden with the weight of a receding winter, which though short, was colder, forcing me deeper into the recesses of my soul. Unaccompanied.

There are places one travels unaccompanied (though the living sometimes say otherwise).
The elements know better in their silent roar. Here is springtime, siding with my soul, pushing me back into this body so I can embrace the shaggy-look of the molting bird perched on the windowsill outside.

I retreat within, feeling fear roar in me like a NASA rocket defying Earth’s gravity. I feel the terror that fear engenders as though it were Daedalus’s voice instructing his son, Icarus, not to fly too high else the sun god do its melting thing with the wax; or too low, else the water goddess soak them feathers and drown him. But Icarus flew as he wished on his made-by-daddy wings. Wings that I, in this Black body, cannot afford. I bear the inheritance of a shaggy house sparrow, even as I know an eagle lives within me. Meantime, I shake off my old feathers in this, my retreat, so I can grow new ones and fly again. … To be continued…

©Ruramisai Charumbira April 2021