The birds return to La Luz and leave me behind
now guided by wings and might.
I don’t think it matters anymore what my eyes see.
They can’t process the reality of being.
Images circle my brain
I wake up every day upset,
like I have to train my mind just to function,
or stay distracted, or under the influence,
or just straight up lie to the people around me.
No, I’m not okay.
But I know I make it look easy
to recover, to heal, to hide,
to bleed clear blood so the red isn’t spilling everywhere.
I’m making strides to improve,
but for what?
It’s so hard to get up every day.
I don’t want to be touched.
I don’t want to be pitied.
I just want to be heard.
But no one will listen — truly listen
or ask me the questions I need
to process the weight of this year.
Losing my light.
Losing the will to live, to love.
I process alone, intuitively, in my mind.
When I speak to myself, I cry.
I laugh.
I cry again.
I take a walk,
I hit the J,
I take a bike ride,
I don’t leave my house for days.
I won’t shower.
I won’t speak.
I won’t press send.
I won’t make plans.
I won’t — and I don’t want to.
I want her to come back to me,
or I want it to be me instead.
This isn’t to make my suicidal thoughts pretty
it’s to bring them to light, because no one knows.
I felt like this one other time, when I was ten
reason undisclosed.
Maybe saved for another poem.
But I felt helpless, hopeless, gone.
Again at thirteen, fourteen,
and now at twenty-something.
I’ve never lived life the way I was intended to.
It never felt real.
I make up stories and timelines and lies in my head.
I live in my head so well
that sometimes they come true,
or I believe them myself.
I’ve always had terrible memory
because I’m never in the same realm as my peers.
Even when I seem present, I’m compartmentalizing.
Weed makes me paranoid,
but it’s the best way to drown the noise.
My coping mechanisms aren’t the best,
but I’m functionally insane,
functionally dependent.
Point of all this is:
yes, I wish it was me.
I wish they’d bring her back,
her light,
and simply take mine.
She fought to be here tooth and nail,
eighty long years.
Why take her?
Her mission wasn’t done.
I cry at least twelve times a day but cover it up
“I yawned too wide.”
“I sneezed.”
“Why are your eyes red?”
“I’m high.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m great.”
I saw her maybe an hour after her death.
I wish I was there sooner.
I cried over her body,
made her hold me.
She moved ever so slightly
it felt like she was still with us,
caressing my head one last time.
Our final touch.
Our final goodbye.
I pleaded with God to put a shimmer in her eyes.
She looked back at me lifeless,
and I could feel her body starting to get cold.
Tuesday morning I got the call while paying my fare for the train.
My entire body shook.
I’m writing frantic because it’s all jumbled in my head.
Do you get that I laid with her body while she went through the light?
She was reliving every good moment in her life
before she reached the gates of heaven,
and I was reviewing every good moment we ever had
before I landed back in my own hell.
If her dying wasn’t enough,
I saw them put her in a black body bag with her name attached
something you only ever see on TV,
Law & Order SVU
but right there in 1605.
Last time I saw her,
I knew she was leaving soon.
I’m so happy she’s pain-free now,
and I’m so sorry I selfishly want her back so badly.
She couldn’t form a sentence,
couldn’t eat her grapefruit,
couldn’t get up
but her eyes lit up when I walked in.
She hugged me with every bit of strength left,
and I planned to see her again after,
but I bailed,
because it hurt to watch her deteriorate.
I missed my last chance.
My light.
My guardian angel.
I know you’re with me.
Please visit me in my dreams,
in songs,
in memories,
in the moon,
in flowers,
in accents and phrasing
visit me with intention,
with stories,
with love,
with open arms.
Watch me run to you,
like I always have.
For Grandma, born 1.23.45
the woman who taught me love,
strength, and quiet grace.
Your mission here is complete,
but your light
it still flickers in me.
Rest easy.
Visit often.
I’ll be waiting.
Every time I cry, I hear birds
in the same breath, the same night, the same grief, the same fight.
Their wings flap around in my mind;
I can hear the wind pass their sides,
hear them whisper things I can’t define.
It’s eerie
like death hums softly in my mind.
Are they a warning,
or a calling,
or both in disguise?
Their chatter feels holy,
and lonely,
and bleak.
Their comfort unkind,
and meek.
Clarity and vision is what I seek.
The birds were a warning,
and since she’s passed,
they’ve disappeared.
Now I see images of crows,
or ravens,
trying to utter things to me
things she couldn’t speak,
things beyond this world,
beyond my means.
We never spoke the same language,
yet we communicated
in looks and laughs,
in rhymes and kid-time baths.
We communicated in art,
and in song,
and through touch,
and through love.
Your Spanish to my English.
Your heaven to my hell on earth.
Here come the birds.
The birds say what the silence won’t.
The birds ask the questions from which I can learn.
The birds
my angels,
or my echoes,
or another coping mechanism
I’ve built
to distract myself.
My eyes can’t see the truth
reality blurs beneath the despair
of my own sanity.
The birds whisper that it should’ve been me.
They hum what I can’t admit,
what I’ve seen, what I’ve wanted
they know me too well.
And if the birds ever return,
I’ll know it’s you.
Guiding me,
haunting me softly,
reminding me that love never dies
it just changes form.
And yet, even in this knowing,
even in the weight of grief,
even in the night when I can barely breathe,
I feel her.
Her light flickers in the corners of my mind,
in the wind through the trees,
in the hush of a quiet room,
in the song of a bird
that I swear is whispering just for me.
And so, I write.
I cry.
I listen.
I remember.
And in the soft, fleeting moments
when the birds return,
I know she has not left me at all.
The birds, or my angels,
or la luz,
grateful,
and sad.
The birds were calling,
and since you’ve gone, they stopped —
a clear warning I ignored
and am now paying the price for.
I want to hear them chirp your name —
loudly, unashamed, boasting almost.
The birds are calling
for the end of this game,
for the end of your life,
for the end of your name.
But they circle the silence,
soft but insistent,
like messengers that know too much
and give too much away without resistance.
Each wingbeat feels like a reminder,
each note a thread pulling at memory’s edge.
They call from the window, from the sky,
from somewhere between here and heaven —
and I can’t tell if they’re singing you home
or warning me to let go.
But I can’t.
And I won’t.
The sound fills the air like confession —
half prayer, half surrender.
And I wonder if you hear them too.
Or if you orchestrated this,
to give me something to do,
something to focus on
that isn’t you —
a mission, a moment, a truth,
all fleeting, all used.
The return of the birds —
not in sound,
but in mind,
in memory,
in symbolic representation.
If the same song follows you in your sleep,
guiding you to the light
the way it haunts me in the dark —
a song, nonetheless,
a song in spite,
a song for us,
a song I write.