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It’s
2:56 am as I walk home and I can hear two distinct sounds coming from the park
across my house. The muffled words of teenagers who have no school tomorrow
because of a national holiday, and a bird chirping…at 3 am on a cold, March
night. I stop walking and I listen, for three seconds. The bird’s song is loud,
penetrating the silence of a city that is clearly awake but quiet.
I
walk into my building, go up three flights of stairs and get inside. I can’t
hear it. I open my window, the one facing the park, welcoming the bird’s
calling and the cold air in. I pour myself a drink, sit on my desk chair and
light my roll-up. No lights, no computer, no phone. Everything is on silent,
except nature. Sleepless teenagers are a part of that too. They can’t be home
alone so they’re here, mindless of their cold, humid, and unwelcoming seating
arrangements.
I
try to think back on such nights as an adolescent, but I don’t think I had any.
Miss goody two-shoes. I didn’t mind it. This heedless feeling of rebelliousness
found me many years later, well into my all too organized adulthood. It tracked
me down when I was happy; curious, but happy. It won, as it always does, as it
called me from just such a place, a cold night, with a bird’s winter song.
Transfixed,
eager, and inquisitive I listened, followed and fell right into the rabbit
hole. That is where I’ve been ever since. I’m well past the mad tea-party, I
barely made it out of the Queen’s croquet ground with my head intact, I was
charged with stealing the tarts, and everyone around me is now asking me to
leave, citing Rule 42, but I refuse. Je refuse…to be anything anyone asks of
me.
I
can hear the teenagers laughing out loud and a part of me wants to go down
there and talk to them. Listen to what they have to say. It’s ironic how they
think that everything is a game, but also that what happens to them now will
somehow define them forever. I was so shy, so closed up, intimidated by stupid
bitches whose sole raison d’être depended on what they wore to school and how cool
they looked while seemingly acting bored and uninterested when someone they
supposedly liked looked their way. I never envied them, though. Never wanted to
be them.
I
always just wanted to be a braver version of myself, and in a way that’s what
I’m still struggling to achieve. I’ve made great strides, I’m in the goddamn
rabbit hole, but now I know that the only way to get out whole is to find that
braver version and take her with me.