Bird

Frosty nights. 

Sometimes you can find your ghostly beauty in them and walk for hours in spite of the cold, but when you walk from the club, dressed only in a thin jacket, all you can think about is how you will get home, pour yourself a strong hot tea, take a shower. But first of all, you’ll be standing with icy hands under a stream of hot water in the sink for an eternity. In the meantime, all you have to do is cover your face with your cold hands against the cold headwind.

The dim light of the street lamps and the half-empty streets at night no longer frightened me or gave me any discomfort. It seemed to me that once I just became a part of them, the same strange passer-by who goes somewhere in the bitter cold, looking at whom from your window you can feel the cold and calling him an oddball you close the curtains harder …

… Not for the first time I find myself thinking that I’m going somewhere, completely disconnected from my consciousness. It’s even funny to see how my body seems to abstract from consciousness, follows some instructions of its own, but eventually comes to the same point with consciousness together.

A strange figure in the snow suddenly interrupted my train of thought. I looked for a long time, but did not understand what it was I came closer and tried to pull out my find. A bullfinch, a dead bullfinch, that’s what I found in the snow, mistaking its frozen wing for something unusual. Without thinking twice, I decided to take it with me, knowing full well that I would not be able to warm it up, but still something made me to do it…

Trying to get the keys out with numb fingers, awkward confusion because I can’t find the keyhole, a heavy turn of the lock, and finally got home.

Having closed the door, the first thing I did was put the bullfinch on the bedside table and ran to warm my hands, remembering at the same time how, when I was still very young, I began to drag home various knocked-out or already dead animals, or various dirty twigs and sticks, as I thought then – medical devices. I remember how for a long time and it seems that I constantly quarreled with my parents, who every time threw out my “trash”, how they argued over what I wore and what time I came home, how after an extraordinary quarrel I again stayed overnight with friends and even slept, sometimes, on benches in the park …

The memory made me shudder a little. I definitely didn’t want to remember that time again until I finally got into university and was able to rent this small apartment on the outskirts of the city…

That’s right, I completely forgot about my bullfinch! When I was warm enough, I carefully placed its lifeless body on my desk. Yes, it must have stiffened yesterday, because its wings did not want to come to the right position, and even slightly thawed froze, like parts of some toy.

Without thinking twice, I opened my sketchbook, took out a pair of pencils, a phone with headphones, and started scrolling through the playlist in search of a suitable melody.

A couple of minutes later, the sketch of the bullfinch was already on the page, while I smoothed the contours a little and thought about how best to convey the colors.

To be honest, I don’t even know when I started drawing all the animals that I brought: alive or already dead, I didn’t care, although, to tell the truth, in the dead, which also didn’t move, which greatly simplified my work, I saw some subtle attraction, as if there was something unearthly in their dying poses, as if they were trying to show us something or warn us… I don’t know exactly, but I sometimes even liked it, as I like it now…