The Bird

At the break of dawn, I arise from my slumber to face another day in my life.

As I go out to the fields, ready to toil under the soon-blistering heat, I spy a lone maya flitting through the rice stalks. Curiously, it does not flee as I approach.

"Well, hello, pretty bird. What a friendly fellow you are!" I say to it.

It cocks its head, and merrily chirps a response. Even if we speak a different language, it seems that we understand each other quite well.

It keeps me company the whole morning, sometimes flitting around the paddies, twice or thrice even perching on my shoulder. Under the shade of the lone mango tree in the field, I feed it bits of my simple lunch from my hand. It pecks away contentedly.

I am happy. I even fancy keeping the bird for my own. After all, it is a good respite from the solitariness of my drudgery in the field.

But I forget, it is still a bird. It is, by nature, a creature of fleetness and rebelliousness. I would have to keep it in a cage if I wanted it for my own. I could hold on to it tightly, perhaps even clip its wings for it to stay. Yet I chose not to, for it would not feel right to do so.

And as certain things are inevitable, the moment comes when the bird decides to go on its own volition. In the late afternoon sun, I look at it as it flees away, slowly tracing its path of flight as it melts into the horizon of the landscape.

It is now truly gone, and I am sad. It would have been nice to keep me company for a longer time, but that is how things turned out to be. The bird was never mine to start with.

The sun is setting and the day is almost over. As I rest under the fast-growing shadows of the lone mango tree, I reflect:

It matters not whether you have experienced joy or sorrow in the company of something even as simple as a bird.

In that one day of your life, what matters is that you have felt.