A Cage With Better Lighting

These days I do a strange thing with the good parts of my life. I check them out to feel if they are really real. Not all the time. But I'll be in the middle of something that's clearly going well and a part of me reaches out to check if it's real. Like when your tongue goes to a tooth that might be loose. Nothing's wrong with the tooth. You just want to check if it's alright. You do it to check.

I've been trying to work out what I'm checking for.

There's a poem I keep going back to MayaAngelou's poem, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. The caged one sings about a freedom it's never had. And the whole poem rests on something I don't believe: that the free bird knows it's free. That if you put a bird out in the open, it feels it. It knows where it is.

As a kid I was in a cage and I thought it was the best years of my life.

I was seven, sent away to school. And I had a great time. I wasn't sad at the bars. I didn't know there were bars. I'd have told you I was free, and I'd have meant it.

So I don't trust myself on this. The part of me that's supposed to tell a cage from open sky has been wrong before. For years. And it was happy the whole time it was wrong.

Now I've got a long list of things that are meant to be freedom. I left the church that held me, once I saw it was also holding me down. I'm building my own thing. I live where I want. By the poem's logic, I should feel free. I'm the free bird. I got out a long time ago.

And mostly I do feel it. I don't want to make the doubt bigger than it is. I'm not secretly miserable under all this. It's more boring than that. I just can't get the checking to stop. Every open space I reach, I find myself checking, am I really free like the tongue goes back to the tooth. Is this the sky, or just a cage with better lighting? Did I get out, or did I only get somewhere and I can't see the bars yet, like I couldn't at while in boarding school?

There's an easy way out of this. I could just decide it's all a cage. That this life and the city and the work are nicer cages and nothing more, and I'm the one smart enough to see it. That's a relief, to be honest. It's clean. You get to feel free of the lie even if you're not free of anything else.

But that's just the cage flipped over. It's the same move, being the man who sees clearly, and I've done it before. At twenty-four, I worked out what being sent away to boarding school and that trauma had done to me, and for a while I felt like I'd solved myself. I hadn't. Knowing the name of the cage is not the same as being out of it.

So I don't get to land. I don't get to say I'm free, and I don't get to say I'm not. The honest answer is the one I keep walking around: from the inside, I can't tell which one I'm in. The bird that knows the difference is the bird in the poem. I'm the other kind, the one who spent the best year of his childhood behind bars he couldn't see, then grew up, then got out, and still gets up at night to press on the good things and check.

I don't know what I'm checking for. Bars, I think. Somewhere along the way I decided that if a place once felt that good and turned out to be a cage, then feeling good is exactly when I should watch out. Maybe that's wisdom. Or maybe it's just the one thing I brought out with me, that I can't sit in the open without running my hand along it, looking for the edge.