I like it when the birds sing, because I couldn’t understand them if I tried

on turning 27

“Concert of Birds” — Frans Snyders

I

When I was 4, I learned the meaning of the word “lost” when the world became a labyrinth of wool and denim, knees like distant hills, shoes shuffling. Her hand had been an anchor, warm and certain, before the tide swept in and the floor yawned open.

Where do the vanished go? I found myself asking, clutching my stuffed panda like a talisman.

II

At 11, I learned the word “grief” when all I had left of a boy made in my image was a tin with imprints of his hands and his feet.

III

At 18, I learned what it was to “fall,” not from heights but from certainty — a sudden vertigo when the ground remains solid but your understanding of it shifts. I built elaborate beliefs out of respect that I mistook for love. The most unsettling discovery wasn’t disappointment but a recognition: how easily I’d fashioned my own illusions, how willingly I’d inhabited them.

IV

At 22, I learned of “loops” when the days became indistinguishable from one another — the light of the morning, afternoon, evening like triplets elbowing through my window. Hours peeled themselves from the clock face, conveyor-belt relics dissolving into a kind of honeycomb memory.

I moved somewhere new, only for the buildings to taunt me with their symmetry — time would continue to fold strangely, sometimes accordion-pleated into moments of intensity, sometimes stretched thin across weeks without landmarks. For months, I would run a path as repetitive as the weary, identical days, as if my body had to learn how forward movement becomes a circle when the mind has nowhere to go.

V

I learned “golden” at 27, on a sunny day in the city when the grass sparkled and the birds carried so many words between their talons that I felt dizzy, and watched them disappear as I walked home.