When I told my grandmother I wanted to wear a cross around my neck like that hot guy in that one action movie we’d watched together, she told me that only Christians wore them. Instead, she got me a bronze pendant in the shape of the sun to better reflect our Hindu sensibilities—only, the sun’s rays were poky and uncomfortable, and I wore the thing exactly twice. The second time only after my mother hassled me to show gratitude for the gift.
Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. I never mentioned the “hot guy” part to my grandmother.
When she died, I was oceans away in a dormitory, thinking about a Physics exam. I only found out because a crow tore its way out of my chest, feathers the colour of a chalkboard that had been licked clean, eyes glistening with beady malice.
My roommate tried to shoo it away with his paper copy of the Undergraduate Student Handbook, but it hopped away from surface to surface with supreme unconcern. I opened a window and let the cruel winter yank it outside.
•••
When I told my best straight friend—
No, that sounds like I had a best gay friend and a best bisexual friend and a best asexual friend.
When I told my straight best friend—
No, that defines him by his heterosexuality, which is, I dunno, unfair and reductive?
When I told my best friend who was straight—
No, that just sounds ridiculous.
When I told Jason that I’d been madly in love with him for the last few months and that it was extremely cringey of me and would he please punch some sense into me—not in a homophobic way, but in a “why do I always fall for straight dudes? BLARGH!!” kind of way—he turned to me in the middle of the snow-slathered cemetery and hugged me so hard, a parrot the colour of an overly-manicured suburban lawn popped out of my chest.
It squawked clumsily. I buried my face in my mother-knitted scarf, because of all the birds, it had to be a shitty parrot, the most awkward of all avians. Once, back in New Delhi, a prophetic parrot had selected a card to determine my future. The fortune-teller claimed the card meant I would have a “healthily-built” wife with “skin the colour of milk-toffee” who would bear me ten children (I don’t think he suspected that “wife” wasn’t exactly an ideal option for me. Though in all fairness, I had only just begun to notice that footballers tearing off their jerseys during the World Cup elicited somewhat different reactions from me than in most other boys).
Even penguins are less awkward than parrots, and they can’t even fly!
Jason tried to catch the bird for me, but it cawed obscenely at him and vanished into the sepulchral verdure, which was actually pretty awesome, because I could just imagine it learning some random English words and scaring the daylights out of some hapless, drunk freshman who stumbled into the graveyard to pee on a poor college president’s tombstone or something.
Jason laughed about the whole thing that night over hot chocolate and then asked me what my jerk-off fantasies about him were like and then laughed again when I threw a pillow at him.
•••
When the random guy on the subway yelled at me that I should take the train all the way to the airport and then “get the hell out of the country,” my chest pounded so hard I thought I was having a panic-induced heart-attack, but it was just a Northern cardinal bursting out of me, red as a bloody sunset, domino-masked like a fucking comic-book vigilante.
I only knew it was a cardinal because I’d seen what a cardinal looked like in the copy of Audubon’s Birds of America that my ex-boyfriend had proudly shown me in the Special Collections Library at my college a few years back. He’d been a library intern at that time.
The bird pecked at the man’s face, and I ran out of the subway car with my friends at the next station. I don’t know what happened to the cardinal, but I like to think it joined the pigeon community in the city as one of their hot, out-of-town lesbian cousins who’s friends with sex workers and underground abortion doctors.
•••
When my parents announced they were getting divorced, I expected a honking great goose painted with tear-stain streaks of moonlight or something equally dramatic to galumph out of my body. But nothing like that happened. I just sipped my glass of milk (I’d recently switched to low fat). I nodded somberly even though they obviously couldn’t see me over the phone.
I ordered pizza that night. I only remember because I never order pizza. It had irregular chunks of unseasoned chicken on it, which I remember thinking was weird.
•••
The day after you asked me if we were dating, and I answered “Yes!” faster than I’d answered any question in my life,—and let me tell you, I’d been THAT kind of nerd in high school—I reached between the buttons of my shirt and the bird I pulled out was brilliant, brilliant blue, like powdered gemstones caked onto canvas in tongue-thick streaks of vivid paint.
I have pulled out a bird like that every day since. I could repaint a slate-grey sky into glorious daylight with the sheer number of blue birds that have blossomed out of me.
I’ve never looked up what kind of bird it is.
I’ll stop there. I don’t need to dwell on the bird that resulted from the last kiss you ever gave me, or the one that grew out of the last tear you shed for me. Let’s stick with the birds the colour of the pristine seascape where we honeymooned, the birds the colour of your favourite fruit freshly picked from your family farm, birds the colour of icicles clinging to granite cliffs the morning of a solstice hike, birds the colour of glory, the colour of frozen, joyful possibility…
