The Bird at the Window

It was a Saturday morning.

The coffee was too hot to drink properly, so I held the cup without lifting it and looked at nothing in particular. The kitchen was quiet in the specific way kitchens are quiet when there is no reason to be anywhere yet.

Then the bird appeared at the window.

Small. Dark. It tapped the glass twice with something that was almost curiosity, then settled on the ledge and looked in. I saw it yesterday. I was almost sure it was the same one.

I didn’t move. Neither did it.

The week has been full in the way weeks become full when you stop noticing they are filling. Someone was going to Lisbon and needed to know about the neighbourhood near the river. Someone else was going to Bangkok and wanted the temple to reach by boat.

I answered both carefully. I always do.

What I noticed, standing in the kitchen with the too-hot coffee and the bird on the ledge, was that nobody had asked me anything.

Not a single person, in all the weeks of careful answers, had turned the question around.

The bird tapped the glass once more. Then it flew.

I thought about that for a while.

It wasn’t a complaint. It was more like a small observation that had been waiting for a quiet moment to make itself known. The way you suddenly notice a sound has stopped. Not loud when it was there. Noticeable only in its absence.

Nobody had asked me where I wanted to go.

I hadn’t asked myself either.

I refilled the coffee even though the first cup was still too hot. I stood at the window where the bird had been and looked at the ledge — nothing there now, just the faint morning light making everything look like it was still deciding whether to begin.

The question came without drama.

If I could go anywhere. Just for me. Where would I go.

I didn’t think about it. I didn’t weigh options or consider seasons or calculate distances. I didn’t do any of the things I would do for someone else.

The answer arrived the way certain things arrive — not chosen so much as recognised.

Rome.

I wasn’t sure why Rome specifically. That was the honest answer and I decided it was enough. There was something about a city that had been falling and standing and falling again for two thousand years that I wanted to be near. Not to understand. Not to explain to anyone. Just to stand in the middle of it and feel whatever it produced in me.

I had explained Rome to many people. I had never been there when the light changed.

The coffee had finally cooled enough to drink.

I finished it at the window.

Then I opened my calendar.

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