I wrote “Inquisitive Bird” with the unsettling feeling that curiosity had grown a body of its own, pacing the room, unwilling to be silenced. Letting it speak on the page felt risky and necessary at once, as if each question it asked might undo a carefully arranged life even as it opened a truer one.
Inquisitive Bird
I fell in love with a woman who mirrored the quiet corners of my soul. My thoughts found refuge in hers, and my life unfolded beneath her gentle gaze. At the feet of my own resistance, love waited patiently.
To abandon such love was never my intention. Instead, I wrestled with the burden of how to cherish it while fearing the truths that might wound it. She was an inquisitive bird, forever seeking the hidden song within me, yet I denied her thirst, guarding the parts of myself I was not yet ready to reveal.
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In case you were wondering, the bird is only ever asking what I’m too careful to say aloud. Its courage embarrasses me, but it’s the only way I know to map the quiet distances between what I feel and what I confess.
Author’s Note — Curiosity has always felt like both a lantern and a blade to me: it lights the path, even as it cuts away the stories I thought I could safely keep. In writing “Inquisitive Bird,” I followed questions past the edges of my own comfort, into rooms I wasn’t prepared to enter but could no longer ignore.
— Author’s Note: The bird was never chasing answers so much as a place soft enough to hold its questions. What it kept circling was a truer kind of home—where wanting wasn’t something to be hidden, and returning was not an apology but a quiet way of saying, I’m still here, still looking for a language wide enough for this hunger.
