Bird's reply

Dear passerby,

I didn't mean to feed you dark ideas and feelings by throwing myself off that tree the other day; I've been meaning to tell you that I'm sorry. I didn't do it on purpose. In fact, I didn't know you we're watching. But I must say... This day I was feeling pretty shitty just like the days you say that are still ahead.

You know we, the birds have this tremendous capacity for announcement. We're kind of wing-equipped Nostradamuses. Everyone knows about the divine capacity of the swallow to announce the return of the love season (it's precisely the reason why the belief of the contrary spread to the point of converting itself into a proverb: men were jealous of a brain being so small, but able to make a little body fly and predict unknown events such as the coming of warmer days). Nevertheless, if you wanna know why you don't see so many of these blue birds in the grey sky of our urbs these days, I would tell you that the hypothesis of further shitty days to come might put you on the right investigation track.

Now, what motivated me to jump off that naked tree without trying to resist gravity's force - despite of my power to do so - is a mystery to me. In fact, it wasn't motivated. It would be more accurate to say that it was a feeling: the feeling that there was a whole bunch of shitty days that lay ahead, and I just didn't want to take part. You know, when you have a premonition,, or a bad feeling to speak in a rational way, your response will be to avoid what you apprehend. Now, you tell me about a better way to avoid than dying.

I am now just another cloud. One of those, that you might say has the shape and form of a bird, right next to the cloud in the form of a tree. Yeah, that's right I'm standing on one of its branches. And I see all you folks and your whole civilization collapsing. You wanna know what's ahead for you, my dear first world friends? From here I see Bangladesh and Haiti, I see Rwanda and Burundi and my bad feeling tells me that the only difference between living in your lousy consumers' society and their chaotic, violent and over-exploited people and lands will be the colour of the skin of the inhabitants. Soon the water supply will dry up and all the oil that was once in our soils will have become smoke that we'll be breathing to find oxygen. I'd rather die quickly from one of the last trees that's left than slowly choked on the rooftop of a building because there are no more trunks in which I can find a hole to pass away in quietly.

Sincerely yours,

Dead Bird