The Overturned
a liturgy for what cannot be saved
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
Over the last few weeks I have somehow become caught in a relentless cycle of relocating Ladybirds—or Ladybugs, for my friends in North America. David’s office is the designated ‘safe room’ for our tiny, colourful friends, and I’ll tiptoe in, hands cupped, trying not to disturb. “Another?” he’ll say, without looking up, as I deliver the bug to a windowsill lined with half-raisins and bottle lids of shallow water. Our little devotions blend into life like wallpaper. There is a twice-daily sweep for ‘the overturned’; the ones who fall onto their backs and cannot right themselves. It’s a logistical type of love and, essentially, a small liturgy for a world that I do not know how to save. I feel a certain kinship with ‘the overturned’. So often, these days, I find myself upside down, and reliant upon something larger than I to regain my footing. Death is surely larger than I, and I will sometimes wrap my thumb and fingers around my forearm, closing my eyes, picturing the bones therein. They tell me that I am temporary, and that I am made of the world. They remind me of how, somewhere in the area of spacetime we’ve labelled as ‘the future’, these bones are already dry, flesh-bare and exposed. And so the feel of their soft, warm current-day cover lands me squarely in the present—which, it seems, is the only place I am sane. Acknowledgement of my temporality rights me.