A bird soars high amongst the clouds. A bird soars over vast oceans, jagged rocked cliffs and man-made buildings. The bird is experiencing its first spring  that it can fly. The bird is young, strong, fast, colorful and joyful. The bird has known freedom its entire life all be it a short one. The bird hears mates calling out to it showing their interest. Joy fills the bird’s heart like warm water fills a bubble bath. Love and light is all it knows. Then the darkness came seemingly from out of nowhere. In the blink of an eye the bird was in darkness, confined to the small space of a single room. This room was slightly larger than the nest it was building. Home was never as dark as where it is now.  It would have been completely in darkness had it not been for three round windows at either side of the darkness it was in. The bird’s heart feels like it has an arrow going through it but that’s no arrow. That’s a broken heart. There is bread here, the bird’s favorite kind. The bird doesn’t feel like eating. The bird feels like sleeping. The bird doesn’t want to wake up. For it is only when it sleeps that it is not hurting. The bird feels like dying.

—————— And now a different perspective ——————

A young child looks out of its bedroom window. The child is full of love, life and wonder. The child opens all of the windows to its bedroom so that it can smell, feel and taste the delicious breezes skimming off of the ocean. As the child enjoys the wind through the window, it also enjoys the sounds arriving at its ears. A train is passing by. The ocean roars as it crashes on the shore and seagulls can be heard in the distance. The child’s mind races and wanders with each passing moment comparing how things are to what things should be. Until a bird flies trough the window running into the bedroom wall. The bird is stunned from the impact and so is the child at the site of it. The bird is beautiful” the child thought to itself and immediately placed it in a shoe box with six holes between the two shortest sides. Through the holes the child saw that the bird was okay. So the child tried to feed the bird but it would not eat. The child was sad for the bird but it would not let the bird go. It thought that if the bird got hungry enough, it would eat. Yet it didn’t eat. It never ate. The child finally opened the top of the shoebox. Not because it was letting the bird go, but because the bird was already gone. In a matter of just a few days.. the bird had already lost its will to live.

Human Beings are not property. Yet even though most would agree with that statement, many treat loved ones like they are. Much like the boy unknowingly did to the bird; most of us want to keep the beauty for ourselves at the expense of their freedom. Freedom to express themselves, freedom to pursue their dreams, freedom to be exercise an opinion or freedom to explore new things without fear of criticism. In the case of the bird, the boy took away it’s ability to fly for his own selfish reasons. Of course he did not intend for the bird to die. However when we hinder a loved one from that which they desire most, we kill them slowly all the same.