Time has grown old, and those novel, worn. Thought has fallen dull, and those longing, forlorn. Past were the rising sun, and the ascending tides. Past were the burgeoning sprouts, and the fledging hatchlings. Past were the daunting height of summits, the breathless vastness of oceans. Past were the arid sand which burns with unyielding hostility, past were the heavy glacier which floats with immovable grandeur. Past were the epochs of superfluity, past were the eons of deprivation. Past were the transient truths, past were the immutable lies. Past were the ancestors of origins, past were the origins of ancestors. Past were the life of the present, and past were the future.

Yet at this moment the bird is incapable of comprehending its madness. Its wings, too brittle to untether itself from the ensnaring vines, remain settled. It stares with a determination as firm as an eagle’s clasp onto the descending sun, beholding its gleam and delineating the flickering margin of where the light ends, as the sun sinks into the valley. It wonders, it remains on the verge of questioning, but is too timid to do so, and so it sits. Perhaps it mourns the life it has made of itself, its birth too late, its death too soon. Or perhaps the world is too tranquil for its liking, and for all these years its ventures have amounted to nothing more than to watch pebbles rolling into lakes. It still awaits for the first ripple, or since it has occurred, the second, the third, and so forth, and as the water settles down, as it shall, it forgets and awaits once more. But it does not grieve, even if it dreams of grieving, for it merely thinks, and it ponders itself into oblivion.

O how it wishes to wish anything at all? It gasps at its own complexity of thought. It lives ignorant of its skepticism, and for the briefest eternity it exceeds the avian kind. It holds, as if it is life itself, the infinite void that builds up through the cycles of day and night, the deceit of nature. Once powerless at the encroaching forces of tomorrow it ensnared itself with the trap of its own design, yet now even at the lack of it, it still finds itself imprisoned by its own stillness. The sun has fully set, and it knows that within hours it shall no longer be. For the first time ever in its life it no longer has to yearn, as it awaits. The fate of all of its insignificant actions finally settled at an instant! No longer shall it count the infinite stars in the sky as if that has been what life demands of it, but it stands, most willingly, at the mirror of time, to its end. It thinks, it unthinks, and it ceases.

The world yet retains its history and its mechanisms. So does the bird, as dead as it is alive.