At the edge of evening a young songbird clung to a cedar bough. The sky was a wide bruise of violet. Her wings ached from training, and the wind, as always, pressed its unasked questions against her feathers.
“Why must you push?” she muttered. “Why can’t you, for once, be kind?”
The wind went on being wind.
She tucked her wings and hunted softer air, a hollow two branches down where the gusts thinned to a whisper. There, in the lull, she found a feeling like safety. She rehearsed the speech she would give to anyone who loved her: The sky is cruel; the work is unfair; I tried enough; pity me a little and tell me to stop.
Above her, a steady weight shifted. An elder songbird—her father—had watched her labor all day. When she sagged into the hollow he flew down and rested beside her, close enough that his warmth reached her, far enough that his shadow did not shield her.
“I see you,” he said.
She pressed into his shoulder. “It’s too hard. I’ll stay here. The still air understands me.”
“The still air understands only itself,” he answered. “It will never carry you.”
She bristled. “You don’t know how much it hurts.”
“I know exactly,” he said, and did not move to block the wind that stirred even the hollow. “I also know what hurts worse.”
The gust rose—gentle, then insistent. It lifted the loose edges of her plumage and found the tender places where flight begins.
“What if I cannot?” she whispered.
“Then you will try and fail,” he said. “But do not call surrender wisdom.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. The wind pressed again, as if it had all the time in the world. She wanted it to soften into apology, to justify her smallness. But it would not. It would be wind, or nothing.
What bruised her was not the wind’s will, but her own wish to be pitied.
She opened her eyes. “I wanted the air to excuse me,” she confessed. “I wanted you to excuse me too.”
He set his wing over hers—not to pin, not to hide, but to touch. “Then let us not excuse what the truth can heal,” he said.
She unfolded one trembling wing, then the other. Not high, not far—only honest. A few strokes into the current, a wobble, a small circle back to the branch. She landed hard and laughed once, surprised by the sound.
“The wind is still unkind,” she said.
“The wind is still true,” he corrected, and there was no scolding in it.
Night gathered. They stayed there—two songbirds, one steady, one mending—until the cedar darkened into a silhouette and the world smelled of rain. When dawn thinned the horizon, the wind did what wind does: it called.
She did not feel brave. She did not feel strong. She felt seen, and told the truth, and held to a standard that loved her more than it feared her tears. She lifted again into the current. The ache did not vanish. But neither did she.
Above the cedar, the air was honest and alive. It bore her not because she deserved it, but because she had stopped asking it to lie.