Low diatribe

I woke this morning to silence.

No wings. No songs. No warbling astromech runs to start my day. Just the house, holding space around what's missing.

Yesterday morning, Ajax told a joke.

It went something like this: "Whee wok shree chirpa chp chp. [pause] Chicca chicca buzz brrrr. [pause] Wikka wok woooooo." Then he made a laughing noise. Then his alarm noise.

He landed the punchline and laughed at his own joke. I don't know what it meant in astromech. I know it was funny to him.

I made his breakfast. I turned the water on for his bath — he stood directly under the faucet, water pouring over him, completely certain that was exactly right, the way he always was. It was the kind of ordinary morning that is exceptional precisely because nothing about it stands out. The joke, his breakfast, his bath. Just Monday.

Then he perched on the edge of the food bowls as I carried them over for the dogs' breakfast. Henri objected. I told him Ajax wouldn't eat his food, which was true and also beside the point — Ajax wasn't there for the food. He was there because that's where the action was. I set the bowls down. Ajax flew off to a shelf.

That was the last I saw of him.

I heard him singing for a while after I went downstairs to my office. At some point the singing stopped. I didn't notice exactly when, I was in a meeting. He sings all day. The silence between songs is usually just a pause.

My wife got home about 15 minutes later. I heard the door, the dogs, the sounds of her homecoming. When my meeting ended I went upstairs and we talked for a while, the ordinary conversation of two people catching up on a morning.

Then she asked: "Where's your bird?"

"Up here — you haven't seen him?"

"No. I thought he was downstairs with you."

We searched the house. Every room, every nook, every place he liked to perch and every place he had no business being. No signs of accident or struggle. No guilty looking cats burping feathers. He wasn't there. He wasn't anywhere. Gone. Vanished. What the fuck happened?

The most plausible remaining conclusion: he must have gotten outside. We know the drill. We've done this before. Cage on the porch. Screens pulled. Food out. Walk the yard, calling and whistling and making R2-D2 noises. Wait.

Hours passed. Nothing. The sun set. Nothing.

The sun rose. Nothing.

I walked around the yard again making R2-D2 noises. Nothing.

I've been able to think my way through most things in my life. It's the tool I reach for first — assess, process, find the pattern, navigate. It has served me well. It is not serving me now.

The mind won't let me grieve because hope is still technically on the table. And it won't let me hope cleanly because it knows the odds. So it runs both simultaneously — grief and hope, hope and grief — burning through a loop it cannot resolve. Schrödinger's bird. Alive and gone at the same time, until the box opens.

Except the box may never open. That's the part that's different this time.

Last time, I had a mantra to hold onto. Until sundown. It was the only thing I had, and it was enough, because he came back before it. This time sundown came and went. There is no threshold to wait for, no moment when the uncertainty resolves into one thing or the other. There is just the open loop, running.

The thinking is making it worse. I know that. I keep thinking anyway, as though I just haven't found the right thought yet.

The cage is still set up. The food is still on the window sill. I know I need to take care of them — put them away, let the grief have its shape. But not yet. Doing that means deciding something. It means choosing the version of the story where he doesn't come back. And as long as I don't do that, the other version is still technically possible.

So I leave the cage. I leave the food. I walk past them and don't touch them. The open loop, made physical. Visible from across the room. And I know, underneath all of it, that I will have to put the cage away eventually. Even if he returns. There will come a day. I'm just not ready for it to be today.

Meanwhile the mind keeps spinning. It started with two possibilities: either he's in the house or he's out. If he's in the house he's trapped somewhere, or hurt, or worse. If he's outside he's on an adventure, or he's hurt, or worse — or, the best one: he met a girl. He found a flock mid-migration and just went. No fear, no hesitation, because he never had any. He walked straight into every stream his whole life. Why would this be different. If that's what happened, he's out there somewhere, completely certain he belongs exactly where he is, singing to someone who doesn't know yet how lucky they are. Every branch splits into more branches. Thousands of scenarios, each one a narrative, each narrative quietly hoping for his return while the realistic probabilities run underneath like a current. I try to quiet it. It doesn't quiet. It finds signal, identifies pattern, fills the gaps with stories. It has never needed permission and is not asking for it now. It just runs. When it exhausts all possibilities, it starts over from the top.

It was raining yesterday. Today too. That detail keeps surfacing. The hopeful scenarios are weightless, abstract, unanchored. The disaster scenarios have texture. They have inclement weather.

And underneath all of it: I'm angry. Not at anything. That's the problem. There's no causality here, no decision that went wrong, no one who left a door open. The universe doesn't owe me an explanation and isn't going to provide one. But the brain that spends its whole life looking for cause and effect is now sitting with a loss that has neither, and it doesn't know what to do with that. Clean loss is easier. You know what you're carrying. This is jumbled. The anger has nowhere to land, so it just lingers.

He was with me for most of my days. Whatever I was doing, he wanted to be in the middle of it — meetings, meals, the quiet hours at my desk. A constant spark of joy, always arriving uninvited and always welcome. He was always the one to greet me when I came home from the pizza kitchen after a late night. I didn't know how much space he took up until the space was empty.

What I keep coming back to isn't the anger, or the grief, or the hope. It's the joke.

He told a joke yesterday morning — the same morning he disappeared. He laughed at his own punchline. He had no idea that was going to be the last ordinary morning, the last dog bowl standoff with Henri, the last singing I'd hear from downstairs without knowing it was the last.

He didn't know. I didn't know. That's how it always works.

I wrote, after the last time he flew out: the past is permanent. What has already happened cannot be taken away.

I meant it then. I mean it now, in a different register.

The joke is already real. The dog bowl standoff is already real. The baths — him standing directly under the faucet, water pouring over him — already real. The peanut butter sandwiches he'd sample without asking, because whatever I was eating was also his. The flies caught one at a time while he complained about the pace and demanded another before he'd finished the first. The astromech conversations we were only just beginning to have. All of it already happened, already mine. The box being closed doesn't reach backward. It only closes forward.

It's true. It doesn't make it easier to feel.

And yet — underneath the grief and the spinning and the rain-weighted scenarios — the joy was never separate from the risk. It was always going to cost exactly this much. None of it was free. It was always on loan, the way everything is. I knew that. I wrote about knowing that. I knew. It didn't help. It still hurts just as much.

I'm trying to hold on to the joy. Brace against the loss. Stay open anyway, because experience is all we have. I wrote that as a philosophy. I'm living it now as a fact.

The cage is still on the porch. The screens are pulled. The food is out. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know if I'll ever know.

What I know is that he stood under the faucet with the particular joy of a creature who knows exactly what he wants. What I know is that he picked a tick out of my grandson's hair because that's just what you do for your flock. What I know is that he told a joke yesterday morning and laughed at his own punchline.

The box is closed. But everything before it is still mine.

He was here. He was completely, entirely, unmistakably himself.

Now he is gone. That is deeply sad, and incredibly confusing. I may never solve the mystery. But eventually I will smile at his memory instead of cry. Today has room for both.

I keep listening for his song.