The bird that sang

I found Maya Angelou in high school, the caged bird poem, I know why the caged bird sings. I read it and it felt like someone had been watching me and written it down.

I knew I was in a cage. I want to be clear about that. This wasn't something I worked out years later and read back onto myself. I knew it then. I knew I was stuck, and I knew there was nothing I could do about it, and the poem said both of those things out loud. Wings cut. Feet tied. A bird that can't get out and knows it can't get out.

That part landed straight away. But it wasn't the part I kept.

The part I kept was that the bird sings anyway.

Here was an animal with no way out, and instead of going quiet it opened its throat. Not because anything had got better. Because singing was the one thing left that nobody had tied down. And what it sang about wasn't the cage. It sang about freedom, a freedom it had never had and couldn't really picture, but wanted so badly it made a sound. That was me exactly. I had a whole future to fantasize about out and not a shred of evidence for any of it. I was going to have a penthouse in New York. I was going to start my own businesses, more than one, I was greedy about it. I was going to take a company public; I knew the word IPO before I'd met a single person who had ever run a company. And I was going to find love, not just find love, be happily married and be the best husband, forever. At sixteen I had the wedding playlist ready. Lionel Richie's Endless Love. Tonight I Celebrate My Love. That kind of thing. I'd settled on getting married in the Swiss Alps. The list went on, and on.

None of it was realistic. I was a middle-class kid; my parents were civil servants. A wedding in the Alps, a company on a stock exchange, a penthouse in New York, none of it was anywhere near my reach. I had no business wanting any of it. The poem didn't seem to care. It let me dream like someone with options, and I did, loudly, from inside a place I couldn't leave.

So I was helpless and I was full of dreams at the same time, and the two didn't cancel out. The poem already knew they didn't. That's probably why it felt so true. It didn't make me choose between being trapped and being hopeful. It let me be both.

There's a darker side to the poem I mostly walked past. The bird standing on top of its buried dreams. The bars it's too angry to see through. The scream underneath the song. Those lines were there. I read them. But at the time I honestly didn't think any of that was about me. I wasn't standing on a grave. I was a caged bird with a good voice and the whole list still ahead of me. The cage was real. I was just sure it hadn't touched me and that I was passing through it on the way to everything else.

I don't know what to do with that boy now. He wasn't wrong about the cage. He could see it clearly. He just read a poem with a nightmare running under it and took only the singing, and walked off sure he'd understood the whole thing.