Budgie's Lament

Waiting for the bus in Saint Patrick's Square on Nicholson Street, I spied a swarm of pigeons and hovering seagulls alighting upon the top-floor window of a flat across the street from where I sat. The pigeons pecked and poked at some foodstuff, taking it in their petite beaks and shaking violently, as the seagulls swooped in and retrieved large pieces of the mystery substance. A symphony of caws and coos rang out over the bustle of mid-afternoon Nicholson Street. Suddenly, a frantic movement from behind the top-floor window caught my eye. It was an avian out-of-place. On the other side of this busy window perched a parakeet, pacing madly from one end of the window-sill to the other, bobbing its head and occasionally taking to flight, flapping impotent wings against the unyielding glass.

I could find only one explanation to satisfy my curiosity. The owner of said frustrated budgie must have sprinkled foodstuff upon the window box before freeing her (I assume it is a her, an older woman in a flowered housecoat) charge from the confines of his (I assume it is a he, a young and pampered bird) cage. She will have sprinkled foodstuff in order to lure the wild city birds, so that they would alight on her window box and provide her young and pampered parakeet with an afternoon of entertainment. I say frustration, but I'm quite convinced she would say entertainment, or at least amusement. My conclusion is thus: Birds are funny, and so are people.

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I have a night, or a week of nights, wherein the plot is lost, as some might say. I try to regain the plot, but busy days and intoxicated nights pull me further and further away. I have glimpses in the day, moments where I realize how far I've traveled from objective reality, but try as I may, I cannot seem to get it back. I need to sit down and write things out, plot things out, work things out, but day turns into week turns into month, and the knot in my stomach grows, and the scowl on my face, and the impatience and the confusion and the frustration, and nothing is resolved. Finally, walking home in the rain, I say to myself, I am ill, I mean I am unwell, I mean I am depressed. Things are not right. So I come home, and do some painting, and do some drawing, and write some email, and listen to some music, and finally it is time, and so I sit down to write.

Things are good, things are very good, for the solitary me. Work is progressing, friendships growing, food and drink and all is good. And for all the time I say to myself, this is all I need, right now this is all I need, suddenly it is not. Because, because lust is not love, and it is only a sometime temporary substitute, and as time passes by the illusion dissolves and I am left, once again, craving love. And now I see, I do not know how to love, anymore. The word strikes fear into my heart, the thought of the deed renders me frozen stiff. Things I was convinced I had overcome I have not overcome. Ghosts return to haunt and hunt, tease and taunt, complicate. The sour taste of sweat from his neck after a bottle of vodka is a sense-memory best left forgotten. The sickly-sweet smell of alcohol perspired in the night turns things on their heads, summons cruel and unnecessary dreams.

Peering through my skull's portals with mistrust, gazing into the minds of others and seeing only vast universes of electricity and anxiety, these things make it difficult to focus on the tasks at hand. There is something I'm missing. There is a trick of understanding I have not yet figured out, a trick of surviving that is eluding me. How do you love again?