Keep Me (See Me #2)

Hummingbird

Well, of course all animals have that element of fear.

The slight hesitation, the way their ears become sharp and their eyes track you, waiting for your motives to bleed into your body language.

Most animals, they are wary. They are careful.

They are analytical. Will this unknown thing, walking on two legs with its only fur on its head, hurt me or feed me?

They weigh the options. Food or danger. Good or bad.

Hell, I don’t know, maybe animals can tell which is which and who is who.

Maybe they are smarter than us that way.

I don’t know. What I do know is that more often than not, you can convince most animals to lay their fear aside.

And… the fact that they evade us, it only makes us want them more.

We mythologized them, somehow. We gave them importance far more than most birds deserve.

We seek them. We praise them. We love them…

But are they even deserving of this praise?

Are they more beautiful than a swan? Or a blue jay?

A robin? Or is it only the rarity that compels us?

They are beautiful. Of course, they are beautiful.

They are delicate, tiny, and fragile. One press of a thumb against their wings would finish them before they could forgive you.

I think they know they are beautiful. I wonder if they are born with that understanding, or if they had to learn it the hard way.

They never give us the chance to ask. It is as if they know what we are capable of. Like they know how humanity treats beauty, treats rarity and innocence.

Hummingbirds fear us. I knew that much. If my thought was a question, I did not have the answer.

No, I had theories and trailing wonders, but I didn’t know, because I will never know a hummingbird.

I do know that we deserve it. Their fear, thank God they have it.

I knew what humans were capable of when we encountered beauty we could not contain.

If I were a hummingbird…

Well, I don’t think I’d ever let a pair of human eyes land on me.

My eyes felt a slight strain in them, but they still tracked the movement from the small bird, the one that sat feet away from me.

It was a bright green color, almost unfamiliar to me in the shade.

Not like grass or the trees but something from a jungle in a distant children’s movie.

Vivid. Too vivid, like it was artificial. Or a warning.

I come here sometimes, or at least, I used to.

To this large porch off the back door of my house.

I don’t know if it was here when we bought the house, or if my dad had it built.

I just know that to me, it has always been here.

It is perfectly contained, fences that were more like walls on both sides of me, but open to the front.

Open to the sun, it seemed to stay there, peeking through the clouds to land its rays on me.

I did not really care about the sun, though.

That was never my motivation for coming here.

The light and I have never really been friends.

I came here to look at the hummingbirds. I suppose I, too, can’t resist their calls. That is the irony of my pondering thoughts. So close to being self aware, yet so far away from doing anything about it. Humans are cruel, yes. We are also hypocrites.

Just like the deck, here before I became aware of its arrival, there was a hummingbird feeder.

One of the very few personal touches that my dad allowed to exist around the house.

He usually didn’t bother with things like that.

Like framed pictures on the wall, or plants in little pots so they could live inside with us.

He has never seemed to like anything that reminded him he was alive.

But… he fills this hummingbird feeder. Always does.

I had a habit of wandering here, to this bench, to this porch.

To look at the birds, their colors, their wings, their beaks.

I just watched. Their movements dulled my brain.

Calmed it down. As if I could only focus on one or the other, the way the wings flutter so fast or the way my thoughts do the same thing.

But when I look at them, I do not know if I admire them. I do not know if I’m hypnotized by their beauty or curious mechanics. It’s bleaker than that. I… exist with them, in silence, in the still, where the only eyes are mine. And I feel bad for them. I do.

So, I’m sure it is in a twisted sense of self punishment that I end up here. Outside, in the sun that does not feed me. Alone, in silence that feels temporary and borrowed. A cigarette in my hand, eyes glued on the birds. Feeling bad for them.

It’s not so often that I find myself here anymore, of course.

Things change. Things end; people move on.

That is what I have learned, anyway. This is not my home anymore.

My home is two hours away. My tiny blue apartment that held more welcome than this house ever offered me.

There are no hummingbirds there, no room for my self-inflicted punishment.

In the closet in that apartment, my clothes don’t smell of tobacco.

I do not have a cigarette in my hand, now.

I don’t smoke. Like I said, no more room for punishment.

Things change. Things change, and they change, and they change.

They grow and they move and they shift their shape, they fall and they rise and they breathe in the summer and hold their breath in the winter.

Things change, and people change, too. We must change; I understand that now.

I have changed. In most ways, I have changed.

Oh, but how I have stayed the same.

Like the sea. It grows, and it shrinks, and it is cold, then it is warm. It shifts with the wind, and it moves when the moon tells it to. It is always changing. But it is always the same.

“How’s my little hummingbird doing?”

The calm voice interrupted my thoughts, or more accurately, stopped them straight in their tracks.

That was one of my favorite things about Zane.

He could pause me. He always could, even when he didn’t know what he was doing.

Maybe, even now, he doesn’t always realize exactly what his presence does to me. Maybe… Maybe.

Everyday I see clearer how Zane moves around me. It is not just fatefully what I seem to need. It is purposeful. It is coordinated. Zane does not naturally move in sync with me, he orbits me.

Yet, unlike a moon to a planet, or a planet to a sun…

he is not compelled to. He chooses to. And that is the difference between love and obligation.

Zane moves around me because he wants to move around me.

He sees me, all of me, who I am and who I was, who I have been and who I hope to become, because he wants to.

Once I understood that, it became something I am always aware of. Like a filter to how I conceive him. An overlay of his choice. So, I bounce between two reactions, appreciating how lucky I am to have someone who chooses to love me, and feeling guilty that I take up so much of his space.

But, like I said, Zane’s presence stopped my spiral, and my thoughts melted into him, instead.

His words ran through my mind, and I stopped to look at the two tiny birds a few feet away from me.

Sometimes I recognized them, a familiar color pattern or extra long beak, but I never named them. They did not belong to me.

“Which one?” I asked him, though I didn’t turn toward him just yet. I knew, instinctively, without thought, that he would come to me, and in seconds his skin would be against mine. So, I didn’t look, I didn’t need to.

As I asked him, I looked between the birds. One smaller than the other, one more green than the other. It would not surprise me if Zane had memorized each hummingbird that had visited my porch. He had spent many hours here with me, after all. After the bad things.

Zane’s chuckle sounded right beside my ear, and a second later his lips pressed against my cheek.

His movements were not lingering but deliberate.

He smelled good in a way that I couldn’t explain.

Like leather and sea-salted air, cedarwood and roses all twirling together.

He smelled masculine. He was no longer a boy now, of course, he was a man.

My man. Like the boy had burned away and left maturity standing there with his hands open.

“Not the birds, silly,” he said as a breath against my cheek. “You. You’re my little hummingbird.”

I tried not to think about the beautiful, irony-flavored tragedy that was.

He pulled back, stood up, and stepped away, and finally our eyes met.

For a second, we looked at each other, then my gaze dropped down to his lips, and the rich brown beard that framed them.

He stood tall and strong in front of me, the sunlight landing on him in a particularly flattering way.

He had filled out since high school, making him seem steadier. More secure.

And just like Zane pauses me, he floods me, too. With a golden peace so warm that for a second, I become golden too. My love for Zane always changes. It grows, it expands, it stretches, it compounds. My love for Zane always changes. But it is always the same.

Zane orbits me like a moon who chooses to remain in gravity instead of freedom.

I see the beauty in that every day. But me?

He is the sun and I am only earth, with mountains, seas, tragedy, and miracles.

I have no choice. And I know. I know he should not be the sun.

But like I said, I have changed but I am the same, and I am trying not to lie so much. To myself, or everyone else.

“Where’s your dad?” Zane asked me, his brown eyes drifting toward the windows, searching for a glimpse of him.

“Cooking,” I told him. That’s why we were here. Once a month, Zane drives me back to our hometown and we have dinner with my dad.