It’s strange, when I look back now, what strikes me is how young I was when we first met.
Actually, we were both young. I watched you as your parents fed you and then taunted you with the same food to coax you out of your nest. You were reluctant to leave, and I wonder if you knew even then. The outside world would not be kind to you. There was only one of you, and I know now that normally you would have had a sibling. Were you wishing someone was there to jump with you?
We were there, watching you, though you didn’t know it. Our hearts beat faster at the thought that you might fledge and we would be there to see it. I held my breath as we watched your small gray body climb towards the edge of the nest.
And then you fell. Wings barely open, you crashed towards the ground in juvenile flight until you landed on a branch. I remember watching you sit there in shock before you started to bravely inch along the branch. Of course, you would learn to creep before learning to fly. But eventually you opened your wings again and hopped from tree to tree in cautious flight. Proud parents rewarded with you caterpillars. You were the first bird I ever watched fledge. We did not know then that you would be the last ʻakikiki anyone ever saw leave their nest in the wild.
The next year, I went back to look for you and mistook your old nest for a new one. In the same spot where I watched you before, I sat for hours in the rain, hoping that you would come. But there was no new nest, and you never came.
At that time, there were still more of you in other parts of the forest, and my friends taught me how to find you all from certain telltale signs. What your call sounded like. What your nests looked like. You showed me your favorite plants, and I came to know mine. It was a game we played. How many times would you evade me while I spent hours searching, and then appear soundlessly right in front of my face. Hanging upside down, you would look at me as if to remind me that only you would choose when to be found. It seems cruel now how close you allowed me to stand near you.
Even then, I was still so young. We found more pairs and more nests. But more often than not, we returned to empty nests and quiet territories. Images flash in my head. Dead nestlings’ blue bodies. Egg shells littering the mossy ground. A mother bird sitting in a nest waiting for a mate that is no longer alive to feed her. In those months, it rained and rained. They called it a wet year, but I think of it as the year the forest wept.
For as quickly as I came to love you, you were gone. It is just like you to disappear like that. Sometimes, when I watched you watch us try to save you, it felt like you knew. The end was coming. I would always wonder what your deaths were like. I imagine you somewhere deep in the forest. On your favorite branch, perhaps. Your tiny body failing. Your eyes softly blinking closed. Your heart beat slowing to a gentle stop. I once saw a pair of you take a nap on a sunny afternoon. I hope it was like that.
They say when someone dies, they live on in your heart. I feel mine beat for you and know it is true. Somewhere inside me, gray wings seem to flutter restlessly all the time. I meet people who never knew you and never will, and wonder if this is how lonely you felt. I struggle to find the words to write about you, let alone talk about you. Two years later, tears still find me, and I cry for you. Some nights I lie in bed and cannot sleep. In the morning, I wake up before the sun is up and find myself trying to remember your call. I think of myself growing older and wonder how I will go on living in this world when you are not in it. My grief feels as quiet and as permanent as the death of your ancient existence, and I know I will carry it for the rest of my life.
In the middle of the ocean, there is an island, and on that island, there is a forest deep in the mountains. It is there, in a small ravine as familiar to me as my own reflection, that I take comfort. It is quiet, but you are still there. In the familiar trickle of the stream and bending of the trees. In the softness of the moss and the blooming of the flowers. In the rain on my skin and in the breath I still hold at the whispers of your call on the wind. But as I watch the invasive ginger begin to fill your territory we both once called home, it feels like you are disappearing all over again. I wonder if one day even my sadness will disappear too, and it will be like you and I were never here. Yet while I am here, my heart will beat for you still.
And on the day that it stops beating, perhaps I will see you again.
-mp
All photos taken by Bow Tyler.