Last night I dreamt I was pulling a dead bird out of my mouth.
A white dove.
Feathers clung to the back of my throat, its hard little beak and twisted wings scraping past my tongue.
Ribs, spine, the delicate snap of its neck. Beady eyes, lifeless, filled my cheeks.
It didn’t stop.
I was choking on it.
And still, I pulled.
In front of me stood two men I loved lifetimes ago.
One older, one younger.
They were screaming at me, red-faced and furious, demanding I make a choice.
But I couldn’t hear them.
I couldn’t answer.
I didn’t understand what they wanted from me.
All I knew was the bird.
The ache of it lodged in my windpipe.
The urgency of extraction.
Dragging a corpse from my own throat.
The taste of rot and sinew.
And God, the hunger.
That was the worst part.
In the dream, I was starving.
I felt caved in, yet stuffed to the brim with something lifeless I didn’t remember swallowing.
My insides hollow while I spat out feathers and cartilage and bile.
I spent the whole day in a haze, trapped in that image.
Trying to work, but every time I blinked, I felt it again. Those slick, wet feathers stuck between my teeth.
On the bus, I told an old Vietnamese lady about my dream.
Her hair was silver, eyes foggy.
“A white bird is hope,” she said. “Innocence. Peace.”
Her fingers found my shoulder, bones beneath skin, light as a wet feather.
I asked her what it meant then, to be coughing one up.
“You’re purging, dear,” she said.
She let the silence swell, then searched my eyes.
“Everything you thought you knew about love is dead.”
Her words followed me all the way across the country,
curled up cold and lifeless beside me on the sleeper bus
creeping its way to the South of Vietnam.
She’s right, of course.
The flutter in my stomach is now just a carcass.
The giddiness, the aching possibility, the belief in soft landings.
Maybe this hunger
is for something honest.
Something whole.
Something alive.
Something I’m no longer sure even exists.
I once held love like a delicate fluttering thing.
Now it’s just feathers stuck between my teeth
and the ghosts of old lovers
asking me to choose between the girl I once was
and the woman who survived her.
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