Birdy

forward. Reaching ahead with the wings and pulling back isn’t enough. The flight feathers work like the propeller of an airplane.
    I get the courage to look down. I am a bird. I look exactly like a canary. I look like Birdie. I fly all over the cage; I try to watch myself fly. It’s a marvelous feeling, more wonderful than I could possibly have expected. I look outside and wish again I could fly free. There are so many places I’d like to fly. It’s so natural to fly and so unnatural not having anyplace to fly to.
    The next day, I think more about my message. It actually didn’t prove anything because I already knew what was written. I went into the dream with it in my head and so I was seeing something I already knew.
    When I finish feeding and checking nests, I take five pieces of paper and write five different messages. I turn them upside down and shuffle them completely. I take one at random and put it on the bottom of the flight cage, face up, without looking at it. I also put some seed, egg food, and water in the empty cage. This doesn’t make sense because there was always something to eat when the other males were there, even though the cage’d been empty for two weeks and I hadn’t been putting in any food. But now, the dream is caught up and I don’t want to take any chance of starving myself to death. I suspect there’s the possibility I could get caught in the dream for several days, even in one night.
    In my dream that night, I’m alone again. There’s the piece of paper on the floor. I fly down to read it. All five messages are on the one sheet of paper. I go over to eat some egg food and drink a drop of water. I look at the paper again. This time there’s nothing on it.
    I’m beginning to know what I’m doing. I’m at the edge of where you have things happen to you or you make them happen. The dream is mine and it’s as real as anything but it’s mostly a matter of what I want. Usually I don’t know what I want, so it’s hard to control the dream. Also, things that happen outside the dream comeinto the dream on their own. I can’t make anything happen in the dream without something like it happening in the daytime world. I still don’t understand but I’m not frightened.
     
    After that, I get so I can talk to the other birds in the breeding cages. I’ve never talked to them from the big aviary flight cage before, or looked at them from there, so I have to wish it on purpose for it to happen. I know the birds, I know where they are and I’ve talked to them before. I put these things together to make it happen.
    I talk to Alfonso first and then to Birdie. It’s good talking to her. I know her so well but we’ve never been able to speak to each other. She’s very excited about her new babies and she’s glad I’m in the dream. She doesn’t call it ‘in the dream’, she says ‘with us’. I talk to almost all the other birds. By looking through the binoculars I know what each cage looks like from the inside and which bird is in which cage. I know who I’m talking to without seeing them. I don’t feel so alone.
    Another way I’m not like a bird is I look at things with both eyes, straight on. I can’t get myself to see the way a bird does. In every way, when I don’t look down at myself, I feel like me, Birdy, the boy.
    In the morning, before I leave for school, I go out to put in new egg food and generally check around. I look at the note on the floor and it’s still there, but just one message. The egg food is untouched. All day long in school, I think about it. I dream the things I know. That’s why I’m Birdie; I know Birdie best. I wonder if I’m a female. Birdie’s a female but I was in the male cage. I’d like to find out which I am. I don’t want to make myself one or the other, I only want to know.
    – Sex, age, races, all that bullshit keeps everybody apart. Competition gets to be the only link we’ve got. But, if you’ve got to ‘beat’ somebody then you’re more alone.
    Games are something we’ve made up to help us forget we’ve forgotten how to play. Playing is doing something for itself; Birdy and I played a lot.
    Birdy really smiled at me there, a true vintage ‘It doesn’tmatter’ smile. He could be putting this whole thing on. That’s OK, too.
    I’ll try singing in my dream tonight; that should settle it for me. In Plane Geometry that afternoon, I get into an argument with Mr Shull, the teacher, about parallel lines. I say they