Every single morning of every day, that bird sings. It wakes me up at four in the morning and won’t stop singing until ten without reason or rhyme. The song is always cheerful, but I feel only sadness listening to it. Does it sing only to cause trouble for me? The song is so annoying, I must have heard it a million times already. So why does this pesky bird continue the terrible tradition? I have the whole song memorized, note for note, yet I must hear it every morning. I’m so tired of the same noise, that I have come to dread mornings and it doesn’t help that I can’t get much sleep because I wake up at four every day. But I made a mistake once that I can not make again and so I will not try to stop this bird as I tried to stop the other.
I don’t know when it was. Perhaps it was early June or late May but that doesn’t matter. The time of year is not important, only the time of day. It was late at night around maybe eleven o’clock. The bird was sleeping outside my window, waiting for morning so that it could wake me up. I looked at the bird and knew what I had to do. This was the only time I had ever seen that bird at night, and it was the only time I had ever seen it look so vulnerable. That was when I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. As I look back on that now, I am aware of the fact that this idea was probably the worst one I have ever had, but I acted upon it right then without too much more thinking. I decided to get rid of that bird right then and there.
I went to grab a shirt to pull...