NOTE: written a loooong time ago when I worked in a public office in Downtown Long Beach

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“Let’s see if you can understand …” even as the words tip-toed through her pulled-tight lips, there was doubt.

She said she fills her backpack with little birdies and crayola and writes about envy and love

Who could know?

Her braids, colored over with light brown gold, are doubled, tied, and resting atop her tired shoulders

Her stroller is empty, but she tells me about her baby boy and the coloring they do in their little birdy book before bed

She bought a package of little birdy postage stamps and a coloring book filled with feathers and wings

How could anyone know?

She strolls the streets of Downtown with her sweat-covered upper lip held stiff and pointing to the sky — she said ‘I am not homeless. Not anymore.’

She tells me her reading glasses are a new find from her travels; the pink frames, the pigtails, the bare feet … remind me that she once was a child

She flips through the little birdy book in the office lobby, displaying for me the pages where she has written the ideas she hopes will soon take flight.

“Love is envy”

“Tree is life”

“Amor, amor, deeper than the sky, more beautiful than the sun.”

“Beautiful birds are friends”

She came into our office today to finally get to the bottom of how everybody knows about her birds.

“I have a right to privacy after everything I’ve been through,” she tells me. One hand on her thrown-to-the-side hip, the other waving her listing fingers in the air, she tells me: “living on the street, no food, a broken leg, losing my baby, growing up, and you — ” she stops herself from going too far, catches her breath, and finishes: “You would never make it out there alone like I had to.”

So how do they know, these strangers she runs into in her day to day, how do they know about the birds?

She tells me I might not understand. She tells me I would get taken or worse out on the streets. She tells me she knows I’m young and scared. She tells me if I really wanted to I could help her make everything better … her face, broken by her years, busts into a smile and she thanks me for my time and spends a few moments fighting to force her empty stroller through the office double doors.

Back to work for me … her tiny, beaten and re-built body could have crashed through the wall and left a cartoon cutout, but she left nothing behind  … nothing but the scent of a Downtown Long Beach afternoon and the question that won’t stop flying around the cage of my wandering mind.

the ticking of the clock, the click-clack of my keyboard, the open-mouthed breathing of the new guy … none of these are loud enough to drown out the chirping.

… How do they know?