I killed a sparrow today. As I sped across the Texas highway at 85 mph, the sun just beginning to set behind me, blanketing the landscape in deep late-summer hues of green and blue, my eyes were heavy with the end of the long day and the thought of the long drive ahead. My mind drifted. As I drove, I watched and floated, and I saw a host of sparrows lift off from the grassy median between the roads and flit as one collective up and over, right in front of my path. I observed the scene, and admired their beauty for half a second. For another half second I thought, “They’re not going to make it.” In the next half second I felt a thump against my car, like a heavy strike against my heart, which then beat louder and louder until I shook out of my drifting trance and looked into the rear-view mirror just in time to catch a glimpse of a little bird falling and hitting the pavement.
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Sweet Sparrow,
I found a remnant of your life and death when I arrived home this evening. It was stuck to the glass, and fluttered as I slowed. I’m so sorry. Your death has muddled the waters in my mind, and awakened emotion that I’ve tried so long to hide away.
When I saw, from my rear-view mirror, your tiny body fall and hit the pavement like a sack of beads, I wept. I cried out, my voice breaking through the highway’s hum and lingering with the passing trees. I clenched the wheel in anger, feeling the horror of what I’d done. I thought about how I’d drifted into the other lane, and because of laziness and embarrassment, I’d stayed there. How my mind had drifted too, how it felt as though I weren’t the actor but the observer in the scene playing out before me. I thought about how I didn’t slow down when I could have tried. How I’d thought, “They’re not going to make it,” yet stayed mentally aloof. Why? I thought about how I left you back there on the road. I thought about your friends, your family. That you awoke this morning to the bright sun, hope and joy in another day. And I wept and I wept.
Then I looked down and I saw my uniform, and I couldn’t believe that I–I who weeps over the accidental death of a sparrow–would be found in an occupation devoted to intentional targeting and killing. And I wept for hope deferred, and for the girl I was before I joined the military. The girl who made that decision. And the girl I always have been, although timid and hiding within–the girl who weeps for sparrows.
Then I thought of them, of their anger and rage and rejection. And I wept for pain and for loss. And for all that was, and for all that never will be.
Then I remembered the providence in the fall of a sparrow.
And I want you to know–I will never forget you.
13 August 2021