Reverie

By Diana Rojas

(Originally published in 'BARRELHOUSE: Issue 26 | February 2026)

There was once a bird that haunted me in my every day. His song would stop me in my tracks. A mournful dirge some days. Other days the same notes hit with a melancholic hopefulness, something akin to happiness. When I heard him, he commanded my full attention and beckoned me to stop, to be present. “He follows me,” I would tell my husband. “He’s calling me.”

I first heard him in the spring of my 40^th birthday. Or maybe that’s the first time I took note of him. I was doing the spring garden cleaning in my house in front of the woods. He was out there in the trees somewhere. From the tranquility of my weeding, his song reached in and arrested me with its beauty. After that, whenever I heard him, I’d look for him, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. I started to search for his song online-- something like Old Soul, tweedle-dee, tweedle-dee -- but could never find an exact match. I didn’t know how to describe the ethereal, the perfection. I started to believe he was in my imagination; he was for my ears alone. I accepted the song was a fantastical flourish to break up the mundane.

When I was a child, I lived a Connecticut suburban life: pretty, comforting, relatively non-descript beyond the common descriptions of American suburban childhood – hippity-hops and bicycles, swimming and ice-skating lessons, roller rink and pizza parlor birthday parties. But we had the wee parts: we’d be out on some road somewhere on errands to Bradlees or the Stop&Shop, all seven of us in the wood paneled sided station wagon that wouldn’t have known what a seat belt was. Dad would announce: “Here it comes!” And we’d get fidgety with anticipation. He’d step a bit heavier on the gas just as we approached the tiny rise in the road, and the County Squire would get an inch or two of air before it touched ground again, and our stomachs would rise and fall with a lurch as if we were on a giant dip of a roller coaster, and we’d screech WEEEEEE! from the back seat. And that was it. That was all we needed to make a mundane errand an adventure. We’d beg him for more. When I think of wee parts I imagine us on a long asphalt road with fields of grass and white fences on either side of it. The idyll. I’m not sure that any road like that existed near our suburban beach town. But memory is sticky like that.

I almost died once. Sliding down a waterfall. When I say it like that, it sounds like an idyllic way to go, and I imagine a rainbow trail behind me and sparkles in the sky around me. But it’s true: I really did almost bite it at a waterfall. We were on a family vacation in Brazil and there was this local attraction, a natural waterslide that lands in a cool pool. My boys went first, led by their father. They went down a few times, yelling Weeee! all the way down. Then my youngest son asked me to join, said he wanted to be my guide. “No, no, no,” I said, “not my thing.” I am a fearful person. “Please, Mom, I want to teach you.” His enthusiasm was hard to resist him, so I went. I’m also vain. The position he implored me to take – scooting like a crab toward the middle of the rock to find a safe place to slide unobstructed – would expose my crotch to the looky-loos at the poolside. I thought the posture would make me look common. Had I even shaved correctly that day? Would they see stubble, or god forbid, bush? Vanity trumped fear. I told him not to worry about me, that he should scoot like he was taught but that I would walk to the center starting point. “But Dad said walking is dangerous because it’s slippery!” “I got it,” I snapped, with that finality of my mother tone. Then I slipped. My head hit first, bouncing off the rock. I saw stars. No rainbows. It went black. Then lights came back on. I saw my son hysterical and his father coaching him from the shore to slide down and leave me. He obeyed. 

A long time ago, when I was a child taking Red Cross swimming lessons at the local high school pool, my mother was also learning to swim. She was terrified of the water. One day, when our classes were over, we were gathered round the diving pool to watch Mom do her first jump – feet first, fingers plugging her nose – off the diving board. She took a very long time gathering her nerve. We started to shout: “Jump! Jump! Jump!” to encourage her. Finally, after what seemed like forever, she yelled “Weeee!” and she not so much jumped, as stepped off the board. She probably couldn’t hear our cheers as she splashed noisily out of the water, swimming like she was drowning, in a hurry to get away from the scene of her courage. When I came to at the top of the waterfall, I offered up a game thumbs up to my husband who was minding the agitated kids who were calling up to me with worried voices “Mom! Mom! Mom!” and then slid down the rock into the water. I thought of Mom and how we would be linked by that fear, thinking that you’re going to die by your own action but giving into something like acceptance of the inevitable, fate. I did not yell “weeeee!” like she did on my way down, but I was not scared anymore. I thought I managed to look graceful swimming out to the edge and using my arms to pull myself out of the pool in one lift, newly revived by the cold water. I felt lucky. Like I had cheated death. 

That night, after dinner, we strolled about the town and finally gave into the kids’ badgering request to get their caricatures done by the street artist whom they saw every night that vacation and begged to visit. I guess the triumph of survival led us to feel less cheap that night than we normally are, so we settled on the curb beside his chair and opened our wallets. They went youngest first, then the middle child (my ersatz guide), and the eldest was just getting settled in the artist’s model chair while the two little ones were admiring their charcoal likenesses when the lights went out for me again. I don’t know how long I went dark; I think it was a while. I’m told it was an ugly, seizing scene on the cobblestoned street. But I was lying in a green field, blue sky, breeze all around me. I heard my bird singing. I felt wee parts. It was gentle. It was beautiful. I was happy. 

I came to, was taken to a terrible rural hospital, was told to lay on a cold gurney overnight and maybe wait for death because there was no way to know if I had a brain bleed. I had seen beauty. The metal gurney did not seem like the right portal for that next world. I was not ready to give up so easily on the beauty of life. I returned to the hotel that night to be with my family. Death did not find me there. I woke up with a throbbing headache. 

Maybe we should all have a near death experience to keep us real. Sometimes I catch just the right glimpse of green, or the smell of a breeze and I’m reminded: this is not permanent. After the waterfall, whenever my bird came around to sing to me, he reminded me: “Life is fleeting. Stop. Listen.” Life will cause my stomach to lurch sometimes, but I remind myself that it’s just a wee part. Enjoy the ride, I implore my anxious mind. 

Nearly a decade after I almost died, I moved from the woods and into the city, and my bird disappeared from my life. I accepted that our bond had ended. Here and there, when I was in nature, I’d hear a note of a song that sounded like him. But it was like catching a glimpse of a photo from my 20s – a blur, an evanescence of beautiful youth, history. But this spring, my bird came back to me, full-throated, sitting somewhere above me in the towering elm that litters the alley with samaras, whose roots are causing existential threats to the pipes of the surrounding houses and whose life is threatened by humans because of this. Somewhere in its canopy, oblivious to the drama, my bird was singing its beautiful, haunting melody. He was real. Yet I scanned the tree and saw nothing. When a little non-descript thing alighted on the branch of my backyard dwarf Japanese maple, my husband asked: “Is that him?” “It can’t be,” I insisted. He’s too plain, I thought. I don’t know what I was expecting him to look like. My dream bird turned out to be a modest looking chap, just a quick spot of yellow between his eyes to commend him. By then the bird was silent, just scanning the backyard for a minute or two before he flew away. Gone again. When he left, I sought out my ancient laminated bird guide to name the bird we saw, and Googled his song: the white throated sparrow. A sparrow. The most common of backyard birds. Brown. White. Besides his flourish of yellow, he could blend in with all the birds we don’t take time to notice.

I’ve been thinking about my obit since I was a cub reporter, in my early 20s. One of my first gigs, a college summer internship, was on the obits page. You have your standard death notice with the basics – who, what, when, where – and sometimes a picture. When folks paid extra for an obit, I would use the info the funeral home provided to tell the reader more about their loved one: where they studied, where they served, what they did for a living, who loved them and why. Sometimes, if warranted, I could call the funeral home for more information. It was always warranted for me; I always wanted to know more. What was their laugh like? Their favorite color? Book? How did they die? How they died wasn’t always a given; most people want to focus on the living, but I always wanted to know how they died, especially the young ones. Was it an accident? Did they kill themselves? Were they killed? Were they unlucky enough to get a disease in their younger years? I always wanted to hear the whole story to the end, ugly bits and all. I wrote obits only that one summer, but I read obits for nearly thirty years after, just about every day. First the news, then the fluff, then the obits. Not for maudlin reasons, but because I thoroughly adhere to George Elliot’s sentiment that “(F)or the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” I’d rest in an unvisited tomb. I was a nobody. It behooved me to mark the lives of my fellow nobody humans. But in my heart of hearts, I wanted my obit to have some flourishes, splashes of yellow to commend it, to make it stand out among the many brown feathers. Maybe even a tale or two of adventures gone awry on waterfalls. 

When the pandemic hit, I stopped reading obits. There was no beauty in it anymore. No more green fields or birds singing or breezes blowing. No adventures of life, or death. Covid was not like a wee part. It was raw. It was scary. It was depressing. I didn’t want to read about so people dying of the same thing, gasping for breath. Too many people were dying. And anyway, I was in the death throes of a years-long mid-life existential crisis and had alighted on my conclusion: Nothing mattered because no one was looking at me. My obit would matter to no one. I was free to be. I could worry not about what others thought of me.

After the pandemic, I gave up the chore of dying my hair. Not without a fight. After having endured so many years in beauty salon chairs trying to faithfully mimic the dark chocolate brown hair nature had bestowed on me for my first 32 years of life, I was betrayed by my scalp when it began to complain with chemical burns. I ignored it for some time, ignored the hair falling out in larger and larger clumps, ignored the crispiness of the strands that hung on. Then one day I was walking down a European street faking an everlasting youth with my damaged dyed hair when I started noticing that all the women of my age around me were versions of gray. They hadn’t been able to visit a salon in a year. Their hair was plain. They looked beautiful. They looked alive. It’s funny how when the truth hits you, it’s so obvious and you feel foolish for not having seen it coming: I had been faking for so long. I embraced my reality in part because my head hurt and my hair was falling out, but also because I wanted to feel really alive. Real, like them.

What a giant fuss is made about Pamela Anderson going au naturel. Her image is everywhere now, along with a palpable sense that the publication includes her to feel virtuous about pretending to eschew fakery, despite still fawning all over the plastic and enhancements dominating the red carpet. Pamela gave up on fakery when her friend and longtime makeup artist died in 2019. She said she stopped finding joy in makeup. I prefer the way she looks now. I used to mock her for her vanity – the pushed-up boobs, the oozing sexiness, the painted-on sex doll pout. I envy her now. I think she’s brave. I think she looks plain. I will always wear makeup because, with white hair now, I’d feel naked without it. There are many women who feel the need to commend me for being courageous enough, un-vain enough to stop dyeing my hair. “I’m just not ready,” they’ll volunteer apologetically, my hair accusing them of something I had not said. I purse my lips and attempt a consoling smile. I don’t tell them that I recently made (and cancelled) an appointment for Cool-Sculpting because I saw my jowls were starting to slacken. Or that I paid a non-refundable $500 to get Invisalign molds made so I could achieve a later-in-life youthful Chiclet smile because I saw my smile on an Instagram post and nearly cried (I cancelled that appointment, too). I don’t admit that my mind’s eye still imagines me with my gorgeous dark brown hair, and I’m often shocked by the white that greets me in the mirror. I don’t tell them that I’m not really brave at all. I just accept their applause. Maybe Pamela looks in the mirror and thinks she looks plain, too. But why disabuse fans of their need to believe in our courage? They, too, will realize that life isn’t about bravery, that we just really muddle along trying to grasp hold of what’s real to each of us. Until we stop.

I was recently in Europe again and was sitting at a restaurant where a bullfight was playing on the screen. Fighting bulls strike me as incredibly vain creatures. The way they strut out into the ring looking strong and gorgeous, head turning this way and that like they’re walking a catwalk, beckoning eyeballs. I didn’t get to catch that part of the spectacle this time. By the time I got to the table and turned my attention to the television, the poor bull, that beautiful, majestic, vain creature, had just sat down in the ring. He reminded me of Ferdinand from the storybook my children loved. But this guy had four banderillas bouncing from his hide, and the blood had matted on the fur on his back, turning it a gooey burgundy. He had given up the fight. When the matador approached him to administer the coup de grace by severing his brainstem with his dagger, the bull didn’t even resist. It was sad and violent. I couldn’t take my eyes off him in his last moments. Why could I relate? Why did I feel such kinship with him, with the idea of having the courage to let go of the idea of life when the time comes and traveling to the next plane without so much fight? I was hoping in that final moment before the matador stabbed the beast and the crowd would applaud him as if he were the brave one for killing an animal that had already thrown in the towel, that the bull, like his storybook counterpart, was in a beautiful green field, a gentle breeze drying his blood-wet hide, listening to the birds sing, picking the flowers.

We were 32,000 feet in the sky, years ago, flying home from vacation with our children when my then second-grade son abruptly turned to me and asked: “Mom, what if we’re just squirrels pretending to be humans, but we’re really just acting, not living?” Ludicrous thought. Brilliant thought. I’m in my mid-fifties now. The older I get, the farther I get from the grassy field, the less lured I am by its smell and peacefulness. The less ready I am to sit down in it and die. It’s not fear that holds me back. I accept that I might get hit by a bus crossing the street tomorrow. But if, like the squirrels of my son’s ponderings, I’ve spent a long time pretending to be human, I want to relish the reality show of middle age, the one I feel I have a starring role in now. 

Maybe this is what aging is all about: finally feeling so alive. So real. In that no one is watching, and I might not even matter, I feel like I matter so much more. Sparrows get a shout out in the Bible for their commonness. They’re supposed to symbolize God’s attentiveness and care for even the smallest creatures. “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.” (Luke 12:6).

I don’t believe in a god. I believe in grass. And breezes. And common squirrels, and sparrows with a flash of yellow whose song is real and divine.