Si oiseau j'etais

This doesn't happen very often, but last night I definitely dreamed I was a bird.

I don't know what kind of bird I was, but I was rather small, maybe the size of a finch, and my feathers were black and white. It's kind of hard to describe, but I knew I was me and I knew as I was flying around that I really wasn't a bird. It felt sort of like I was given some sort of temporary gift, like something was allowing me to see life from the perspective of a bird.

I was flying around someones house (not my own), through a garden, sometimes landing on a wooden fence, sometimes on the roof. At some point I saw a family, in a blurry off to the side sort of way as if I weren't really looking at or paying attention to them. I think it was a mother and her two kids walking out of a garage where they had parked their car.

At some point I landed on a water hose or something long and skinny on the ground. (Probably because I got stung by that thing) I quickly took flight when I saw a large red beetle crawling in my direction through the low-cut grass.

I remember circling a large tree and seeing the sun in the distance. For a moment I felt like I was being drawn to it, like that's where I belonged. I saw a few other birds in the distance flying toward the sun and immediately started after them. But the more I flapped in that direction, the heavier my wings seemed to get. Not only that, it seemed I wasn't going anywhere because I kept circling the tree even though I was trying my hardest to fly toward the sun. I felt like I would burst into tears as a sick feeling started to grow inside me and a weight seemed to bear down on top of me. My breathing became labored. No matter how hard I flapped and how much I tried to change my direction, I just kept circling the tree.

When the other birds seemed to disappear into the radiance of the sun, I heard a sound. It was soft at first, distant. I heard it once, then again but louder, and again even louder. It was the sound of my cell phone's text message alerts.

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And that's when I woke up. I had fallen asleep on the couch, and when I looked down at my phone on the floor there were four text messages received. All of them were from the same person. None of them really were necessary.