I made eye contact with the bird, feeling the summer breeze brush my skin with the scent of nostalgia. Childhoods, many, come and gone. Standing here, eye to eye with an old friend in the yard of my childhood home, I felt free again. The house was gone, condemned and demolished, but the tree remained, and the grass, and the birds. Although the ground was harder, denser, and the air didn’t smell as good as I remember it back then, I closed my eyes and imagined myself becoming him again, that little boy. Could I melt into the bird and fly away from it all - the many woes and obligations of adulthood - to see my little friends again, laugh again, and experience life with fresh, unjaded eyes?

I opened my eyes and the bird was gone.