Low diatribe

Valya didn't like the running tap.

She'd splash around happily in a sink full of water, curious and funny and completely herself — but the stream coming down made her nervous. I learned to run the faucet against the side of the sink, let the water pool quietly, and then step back. She'd hop in like she owned the place.

She was with us less than a year. One day she was fine. The next she was quiet and subdued. That night she was gone.

The bird who lived, then didn't.

That's the whole story. There's not that much more to it than that.

There's a kind of grief that has a shape.

She was here. Now she isn't. That is sad.

You can hold that. You can set it down, pick it back up, turn it over, know exactly what it is. The edges are defined. The loss is real and nameable and — not easier, but holdable. You know what you're carrying.

The other kind of grief doesn't work that way.

The job search has been going on long enough that uncertainty stopped feeling like a temporary condition and started feeling like the weather. No edges. No date of loss to point to. Just the ongoing accumulation of not-knowing — the kind of thing you can't mourn because it hasn't ended, can't celebrate because it hasn't resolved, can't set down because it doesn't have a shape yet.

Clean grief, I've learned, is easier to carry than the messy kind. At least you know what it is.

Valya's death landed in the middle of all of it. Small on its own. One more thing to carry.

A few weeks after Valya died, one of our sons found a baby starling in a parking lot.

Valya had been a fresh hatchling when my wife found her — eyes still closed, entirely helpless, the whole world still ahead of her. This bird was maybe a week older. Eyes already open. Already scrapping. Already, somehow, insisting on surviving.

But still small. Still in need of warmth and care.

I hand-fed him for a few weeks. He forgot how to be fed and learned to eat on his own, just like Valya. He learned the rhythms of the house, just like Valya. He made himself at home in the particular way that starlings do — completely, immediately, without asking permission.

My wife and I both noticed it early: he has a distinctly dominant personality. Confident in a way that announces itself. We named him Ajax.

He's a chatterbox — sings to himself, squawks out the window at whatever catches his attention. I've been playing him R2-D2 sounds, and he's starting to pattern after them. He was always his own particular thing. He's just becoming more of it.

With Valya, my wife was her primary caretaker. This time I volunteered. Ajax imprinted on me — which feels right, and also like something I didn't know I needed until it happened.

He makes it known. When I walk into a room he lands on my shoulder before I've settled. He answers a cough with a squawk — not alarm, just response, like he's keeping his end of the conversation. He lands on my hands while I'm eating and samples whatever's there without asking, because of course he does. He's incredibly fond of peanut butter. I catch flies for him sometimes — he swoops down and takes them out of my hand like it's the most natural thing in the world. He's not waiting to be invited. He already lives here.

The rest of the family gets this too. He's not mine exclusively — he's just decided we're all his. He picked a tick out of a grandson's hair last week, matter-of-fact as anything, like that's just what you do for your flock. When my wife brings in broccoli from the garden, he finds every little green worm in a flurry of delight. He steals mealworms when we're trying to feed the bearded dragon.

He is not Valya. He doesn't try to be. I wouldn't want him to be.

He's perched on my laptop screen as I write this, sleeping. His black and white adult feathers are coming in on the sides — like he's wearing a fancy vest. Very much a teenager tuckered out after prom.

When I prepared the sink for his first bath, I ran the faucet against the side the way I'd learned with Valya. Muscle memory. What the last bird taught me, carried forward into this one.

Ajax pecked at the side of the sink, trying to get under the flow.

So I moved the faucet to the middle. He stood directly beneath it — water pouring over him, splashing in every direction — with the particular joy that only a starling in a bath can project. Unbothered. Delighted. Completely certain this was exactly right.

Valya taught me how to run a bath for a starling. Ajax taught me that he wasn't Valya.

Both things are true at the same time.

The consulting comntract came through around the same time Ajax arrived.

Four months of engagement — not the answer, not the destination, but a ray of light into a darkness that had been accumulating for a long time. It doesn't erase the uncertainty. The job search is still the job search. The messy grief without edges is still there, still ambient, still without a resolution date.

But the light doesn't need to erase the darkness to matter. It just needs to be there.

Ajax doesn't replace Valya. The consulting gig doesn't resolve the search. Neither of them tries to. That's not what they are.

What they are is simultaneous. Present in the same space as the loss, the uncertainty, the accumulating weight of not-knowing. Not after it. Not instead of it. Beside it.

I still run the faucet against the side of the sink sometimes, out of habit.

Ajax corrects me every time. Walks straight toward the stream, pecks at it, looks back at me with the particular patience of a bird who knows what he wants, waits for me to move it to the middle.

I move it. He stands under it. The joy is immediate and complete and entirely his own.

Valya was here. Now she isn't. That is sad.

Ajax is here. That is something else entirely — not a replacement for the sad, just its own true thing, arriving beside it, insisting on being itself.

The bird who lived taught me how to lead with curiosity.

The new bird in town is teaching me that joy doesn't need permission to arrive.

The water's in the middle now.