Love is a Bird

She had these long, pink shiny nails which flashed every time she rubbed her neck. A few minutes would pass and soon a hand would appear, curling and kneading. She sat swanlike, bowing her head now and then to stick a glob of whip cream in her mouth. I absorbed her presence, excited that all my senses were reacting to her. My nostrils were pulsating, soaking in her honeyed scent. I wished we were facing each other, but the pink nails against her long neck were sexy. She was art.

She turned around, rested her chin against the booth seat and said hi. Then she was sitting next to me, her knee against mine. I was inhaling her perfume like it was the only thing I ever wanted to breathe again. She looked at me in a way which promised loyalty forever. I was crazy, in love, paid for her banana split and coffee until the annoyed waitress left.

“You shouldn’t have left her a tip. She has terrible nails.”

“What?”

She whispered in my ear that the waitress was really mean to her when she had come in earlier that day for lunch, even after she left her a big tip. I was stroking her fingernails, kissing her fingers, her hands. We felt a current of heat between each other and soon we were walking in the dark, stopping and gifting each other with romantic wit and long stares. She made me give cash to every single homeless man we passed by.

“You better not get any ideas. I’m a lady.”

In half an hour, she had fashioned a bedroom shrine on my balcony. We went to the pipe shop 4 times until she was happy with the space. She was art making art; I fell asleep to a hundred lit candles, smelling her fragrance, incense and douja. My stomach was empty probably for the first time in my life before going to bed.

“After lunch, you have to fast until morning. The only thing you can have is liquids until the next morning. You are going to feel so energetic and powerful.”

I loved that she was instructing me to not ever eat after lunch after we just ravaged a jumbo banana split for dinner. This is what it meant to feel ‘tickled.’ She was a fun, little bird who came from nowhere and flew into my heart.

“I think you’re my dream come true. I always wanted a woman to tell me what to do. Exactly the way you do.”

“Oh, my dude, I’m going to change your life.”

“Please do…”

We kissed even in our sleep. She made me promise right before she undressed that I can never, ever ask her about her past. So I couldn’t tell her that I would die for her, I loved her and she could never leave. I felt it at the diner, I loved her as soon as she had walked in.

I wanted her to stay with me…my life had no soul before her. She turned one room into a garden and told me to get reverse-osmosis water. I never could imagine that

the human body could function so optimally, so efficiently, that my brain could think as clearly and intelligently as it was. We took our shoes off at the park and became members of a community garden. She gave fruits and vegetables to the homeless, cursing the idea of eating meat. We meditated on the balcony every day, at least three times. I went to hot yoga and took hot baths. She made me buy a ton of gold, some for her but mostly for myself. She explained that the tips of all the ancient pyramids were constructed of 24 carat gold and that gold is Man’s strongest weapon and protector. I became stylish, went to men’s salons and learned good manners. She would clasp her hands together, gushing at what a perfect gentleman I was. I loved coming home to her. She wore aprons over my tea shirts. I loved her, I didn’t know what love was until I met her.

My home was photographed for a huge design magazine but she insisted on not getting credit and she didn’t show up on the day of the shoot. The director told me that my interior design was the best work he had ever seen. Before long I got calls and clients, taking the secret genius with me to do all the designing. I loved watching her long nails gliding along furniture in ritzy boutiques, judging the colors and textures with her childlike looks of fancy. But nothing brought glitter in her eyes more than thrift shops. She’d pucker her lips like a tight rose bud and then blow dust off lamp shades. We would walk out the stores covered in old smells, lint, dust and a million design inspirations.

She would close her eyes and get complete pictures in her head, and once unraveled in the actual homes, her brilliance proved itself once again. I was making money, taking credit for all the art . I took classes online and built a library just to display a colorful keyboard of beautiful books. I had to show big indications of talent, especially because I now had a website. Giving money away energized me like nothing else, I loved her for showing me the real path to joy. Make money and help as many people as you can, she’d always say.

She was a saint who smoked weed and belly danced, she wore Amber oud and ate sprouts. She sang every day, her voice was like a bird inside my heart. She never came without an old, beautiful book in her hands, reading to me often. Her ideas were all golden, she was an alchemist - with just one problem. She had dreams so horrific which made her launch upright from bed, hyperventilating, crying and trembling. I would soothe her to sleep and she never remembered the next day. I wasn’t supposed to ask about her past and I never did. So I never brought up the nightmares because I wasn’t stupid.

She purposely had no cell phone, no email address, only a P.O. box which she got her rejection letters from. She kept a thick folder of all her rejection letters which she laminated. She kept a carbon copy of each one with corrections, scribbles and drawings all over it. So when she didn’t come home for three nights, I wrote her a letter. Her response made my heart tighten. It was a stamped jumbo index card which read, “My Dude, thank you for the best 6 months of my life. I love you. Be Good. Love, Alex.” I almost fainted, wailing for her for weeks. The hole in my soul was sucking the life from me, I was lovesick. I just couldn’t peel off the deep confusion consuming me. Her name wasn’t Alex but it was her handwriting. She always called me “my dude,” I truly loved her.

Then the phone call came. Her funeral was heavily attended and I learned who Alex was during the moving, gripping eulogy. Alex was an African grey parrot whose passing in 2007 made news for its touching story of love and compassion between animals and humans. Alex was a hyper intelligent parrot who was called “the Einstein of birds.” He had a deeply special and close bond with his caretaker, an animal psychologist who loved him like her own child. One night when his owner was saying goodnight to Alex with her usual kind words, Alex responded with more than just a good night. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Be good. I love you” were Alex’s final words. My beautiful lady had thanked me on the postcard that way because she knew she was going to die, just like Alex did. She often told me that animals know for quite some time ahead that they are going to die, but she never told me the story about Alex, the African parrot. Saving it as a mystery to uncover for me is how all surprise gifts should be. She believed that a part of an animal’s six sense is their ability to foreshadow danger, and always their death. That was the argument she used to prove that we are not supposed to eat animals because they are psychic about their mortality. Her funeral became a celebration of how she had loved all the creatures on earth, and how she had inspired so many people to be brave about their dreams. She was their muse, my lover and was a true living work of art. I was greeted with so much gratitude; she must have spoken about me with the passion. I didn’t even know she had any friends or family. I let her navigate the discussions we had which were talks of the glory of animals, of our responsibilities as custodians of the earth, of the vital importance of art, reading and creating.

Six months before, she had left a note with her parents detailing her dreams of travel and how she was going to spend the next year taking splendid trips worldwide. Everyone believed her to be in an exotic country doing a yoga retreat when in reality, the only distance she had traveled was a five hour bus trip from her hometown of Washington D.C. to New York City. Her mom described what her daughter was wearing when she dropped her off at the airport – the exact same outfit which seduced me that night I met her at the diner with her pink nails. That night had been her first night in New York City, the night she attached herself to my heart like a soft moss inside my chest. Her past which came to life after her own life ended. She was a writer, an animal rights savior, an artist in every way. She had told her friends when she went back home to D.C. to gather her affairs that I had never brought up her nightmares. They were so proud of me for being so good to her. She was a military veterinarian who treated soldier dogs in conflict zones. Her dreams were flashbacks she couldn’t help in her sleep. I didn’t realize until after the funeral that on the last night before she left, she slept very still, deeply with a smile on her face. Her arms were crossed over her heart.

Her friends and family also told me that she must have had a change of heart at the airport, that she had planned to start her world travels by flying to Costa Rica, but they began receiving postcards from New York City, that a final attempt to re-submit all her poems was the most important item on her bucket list. Her friends told me that she walked into the New Yorker building with her huge binder, crying to the receptionist with the soft heart. She took the binder and promised to get the poems to the right people.

She was very sick, with a progressive disease which was killing her, lived with me for six months, and I had no idea. During the day when I thought she was working full time, she was writing in a room she was renting in the village. When I discovered the truth, I didn’t see it as a double life. I knew she had a bunch of secrets but none of them involved breaking her loyalty to me in any way. I knew she was golden. She changed my life by generously giving me so much courage and support. Her gentle energy was the softest, sweetest spirit which ever graced my life. She was the gift of my life, before her, I was a robot. The girl with the hot pink nails had my future in her hands the moment she sat next to me and looked at me with a million promises of love in her eyes.

Birds sing their love songs and we listen with pleasure. We ought to pay attention to their other behaviors, too, like how they fly away and shouldn’t be trapped. Her love was a bird which flew into my heart and it’s still singing, forever singing. Love is a bird. Once it flies inside your heart, your life will become a song. Every night before she went to sleep, she wrote on a notepad on her night table: “el amor es un pajaro. Besos, Paloma.” She was my bird of paradise who when even facing a close mortality, she chose to be of service. Paloma was my special dove. Forever on after learning all her past, I sign off, too, with the same sublime words she always said. I say it, write it, think it, do it, and mean it.

Be good. I love you.