Migrations from the Dark
No sight, just vision
I am writing in the middle of the night again.
I wake and my fingers glide to the app that cradles my words. No glasses, no sight, just a vision. I let the vapor of an idea lead the way. I try to not get too involved, I don’t want to question what stirs me, don’t want to doubt it away. The shoddy grammar, missing letters, lacking punctuation— they will all be found in the daylight. This sheath of darkness is a time for capturing the lightning striking in my head.
I have learned if I don’t get it down when it comes to me then the faultless words will be gone. They are fleeting little things. Like a tide, it comes, it goes and when it returns it will be to a different shoreline with a different catch. I want the first ones, not the impressions they leave behind. Too often it resembles impersonations, a mimicry of my own work. It has proved worth waking up in the witching hour, it is when the magic happens.
It was a magic moment that left me a new title. Even with the sunrise I think I still like where it is pointing. I think most (all) of my titles have felt like a stand in, awaiting the real thing that will come in and take its mark. This feels like it is expressing where I am traveling to. Perhaps it will all be eaten up as a midnight snack later when the next idea arrives, but what washed up has me making progress.
Migrations have become a bit of a fixation lately. The innate sense of needing to travel elsewhere, the instinct of needing to go. I see myself in these compulsive movements. An undeniable force of being. As I grew I denied many passages of my own life and it was traveling— leaving then returning that made me feel like I had discovered my own migration pattern. My first migration showed me as a farce of myself and I have returned each year since to learn more about the kind of creature I am. Often in the same season ((which I actually wish wasn’t the case, but migrations happen when they happen)) the birds have their reasons to go when they do, and so do I.
Too long I was lost in route. Too long I was new to going. Too long I was new— and I got old. I have long circled the impacts abuse had on my relationships throughout my life. I think it blighted me— and my marriage, and ever since I stopped hiding from what is true about me— true about my life, I have entered a new route that could lead me to the one place I have long avoided the most but find I am now incessantly, insistently drawn to: I migrate to myself.
Below, I share pieces of my latest scribblings. These are excerpts from chapters four and five. I hope they offer some explanation for the title and what I shared last time. They need work. The tenses are awkward— mostly in present tense. I don’t know why it came out that way, but it does not often work. It is missing the atmospherics. My environments are a thin wisps of something,. I want more. But, the bones are there. My bones, like a bird’s— hollow and keeled. Ready to fly again.
with all that said…
photograph by Heibaihui from Canva
The Bird Beak Migrations
….The room smells of waxy smoke, cake frosting, and wet swimsuits. My friends are calling out the slices they want. That corner, those flowers. I want the letter ‘A’ from my name but it is in the middle of the cake and I worry I will be told no. I don’t ask.
This isn’t frosting in the middle so I ask my mom what it is. She doesn’t look at me, “Custard,” she says, she returns to her conversation so I leave it at that. I don’t know what custard is, but it is the best cake I have ever eaten. The room is quiet but for the plastic forks scraping on paper plates. The silence of good food will always be a favorite sound to me, I wonder if it started that day.
I eye the small pile of gifts while eating. They are melted wax wishes tucked inside of bright paper about to come true.
I unwrap a small box, it is a child-sized treasure chest. The treasure is a girl and I love her immediately. She is similar to the ballerina on my cake but this one has a painted mouth that makes her look sad. Her pink net tutu is bent and lifted up from where she is forced to lay down. Maybe she would like swimming better too. But she is fixed in her place. A spring is attached to her pink slippers holding her in. She is reverberating from when I opened the lid, she is already dancing. I wind up the key on the back of the box to make her spin. She quivers and twirls out of time with the music that chimes off rhythm with itself. She is perfect. I want to live in there with her. I try to hum along but the high pitch of the song is beyond me. I keep trying anyway. I have heard it before. It seems sad, like her face.
I close the box, I open the box. She springs up every time. I close the lid again and then open it just a tiny crack to peek inside and see her not spinning, not up right. I want to see her at rest too.
You don’t have to perform for me.
You can just be still.
I wonder what I might have, what else is worthy of being in there with her. I keep trying to sing along with her tune even though it stops when the box is closed.
“Who is killing a cat?” my dad says.
It feels like everyone laughs. He is looking right at me, he chuckles and thinks he’s funny. I swallow the song and it sticks in my throat like a cold porridge.
Rushing blood makes my face hot, my stomach is tightening around little more than cake and pool water. I push the treasured dancer to the side, I don’t want this to be her introduction to me.
Now I am the one with the sad face. I am the one who wants to lie face down in a box. One friend is looking right at me— into me. She is not laughing. Her mouth is painted to look sad too and the shape of her mouth is enough for me to not run away. I grab another present.
To Andrea. Grandpa. I open the package and discover a ceramic tea set. Small, red with white ribbons painted on the edges of the cups and saucers. The teapot itself is shaped like a stout little bird. Wings on the side are painted with the same white ribbons as the cups. The spout is shaped like a bird beak, open and singing silently like me. The little top looks like there is a feather sticking out of her small bird head. I grasp it and peer into the tea pot. Another special place to hide.
“Thank god. This one doesn’t make music,” my mother says. My parents laugh again. My friends don’t react this time. They have stopped listening to the adults in the room and are passing the ballerina box to each other. They stopped seeing me and see only the things they might want for their next birthday.
It was my ninth birthday and I stopped believing in candle blown wishes.
…I go to the garage to look for a hammer. I need something heavy to wield over it. I want something to wield over them. A hammer is right there but I have to reach over the dogfood to grab it and there are maggots swimming around in the kibble. I question what else I could use instead. I fear their wrigglings might geton me but instead I look away and push my hand high up through the air, to avoid the squirming. My fingers walk over it, gripping it with only my fingerprints. I pull it closer and take it. It is cold in the early spring air. It feels heavy and I don’t know how to hold it.
I wander back to the grove of trees along the wall of the yard. I sit down in the dirt where I have already set up my tea party. The squirming bugs here don’t bother me because I see them all the time. Ants, beetles, there might even be worms close by, and flies don’t freak me out because they don’t wriggle. Now they have wings. I understand I am where these bugs belong. They don’t frighten me.
Without thinking, I begin to hum the song they told me I had wrong. I let my throat relax, soften. Louder, fuller. I have made it a hymn. It is something to have some faith in.
Wrapping my fingers around the neck of the hammer I decide. I let them slide down the length of the handle. I grip it at the bottom and raise it over my head. I don’t second guess. I don’t think it over. I bring it down without effort, it just falls. Without any striving I smash a red cup. Then saucers. I am belting my heart out, I want it to come out of my throat, out of my body. I want my voice to show me who I am when they aren’t around. I want my heart to slide out of my mouth so I can see what I look like. I feel I must be so dark inside and I want to know if that is true. I want to know what I am without their words on me. I raise it again, hammer over my head, I bring it down on the little tea pot. The silent singing bird beak lets out no cry, but I do.
I am choking, but I don’t cough. I seal my lips and try to swallow, but muscles in the back of my throat resist. My neck feels thick. My mouth is watering. I lean over and let the spit fall out of my mouth onto the dirt. I feed it to the ants. I wipe my chin and the wet shines on my hand like a bleeding snail has passed by. I think I must have sung too loudly. My throat hurts, but I’m proud of that. It means I won.
I look down at the shards. I cover what remains with dirt. The little red beak is gone. Me and that song bird are silent…
Andrea Thomas is a late blooming American writer. Her speculative nonfiction examines the cultures of trauma, societal expectations, and her insistence of self-discovery. These central themes from her life are the scaffolds of her writing. As her memoir work continues you can read her essays at Bird on a Mast on Substack, and check for proof of life on Instagram.
A Post Script from a horrified American.
I want to express that although this essay doesn’t seem to be about colonialism, fascism or violence, it is about America- which is all of those things. My work is political. Trauma doesn’t live alone, it neighbors with silence, which is what my government wants. Silence.
Art fights silence, it fights complicity.
Look for the helpers, be one. Ask if people are okay. Keep going.
In the dark times,
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
Writing is my singing, and it is about the dark times.
Sing until your throat hurts. It is how I know we will win.
Image by Loving Squad
