The Enchanted Aviary: A Bird Lights A Lantern For A Long-Lost Love

The birds' mah jongg session ended promptly at 6:00 PM, as it did every week. Such a time was convenient for all, allowing them to get home to their respective cages, wash up, and prepare their dinner. The Cosmic Birds thanked the Dreamer Birds for another pleasant reunion. The house lizards packed up their catering things and repaired to the upper-floor ceiling of the hermitage to count their earnings.

The female Dreamer Bird did not return inside their cage immediately upon seeing their guests to their door. She flew, instead, to the Temple of The Bird Goddess, close to the ceiling of the small loggia, and there, on the great altar, lit a patchouli incense cone. She prayed with all her heart that she would be reunited with her one, true love, the African ring-eye, someday. The expression on the face of the huge ceramic statue of The Bird Goddess was albeit unreadable.

Back inside their cage, the female Dreamer Bird flopped on a couch and stared dreamily into space. Her male partner was tempted to ask why she had such a dreamy look on her face but refrained from doing so, reasoning to himself that she was a Dreamer Bird, after all, as was he, and that they definitely had the right to have dreamy looks on their faces anytime they wanted to.

When dusk had set, the female Dreamer Bird looked out of her bedroom window toward the top of the tall condominium on Banahaw Street, behind the compound. The building was, she noted, the Y.P.L. Mansions II, a housing tower for humans, and there indeed, in the brightly lighted window on an upper floor, was the bird cage that held her dashing ring-eye, exactly as the gossipy house-lizard-head-waiter had told her. She could make out the shape of the bird cage in the window, for it was hanging right in its center, and the silhouette of the lone pet bird that lived inside it.

Now, birds are psychic, as we all know, and can send telepathic messages to one another provided that the recipients of these messages are within their sight. The Dreamer Bird called out its loved one's name, and he raised his head in surprise, as though awakening from a dream, and responded. They had a lot of catching up to do, but, for the present, were overjoyed to know that they were not so far from each other, considering that birds can be distanced from each other by thousands of miles.

Their current objective was to find ways and means to be together once again. Until that time came to be, the female Dreamer Bird made it her vocation to light a lantern outside their cage every evening as the sign of her undying love for the ring-eye.

They had not forgotten their love song:

The feathered curve of your head/
Like a grassy mound, like a fluffy cloud/
Your eyes onyx cabochons set in ivory/
Your beak a pair of petals of the delicate, pink lotus/

Should you pass by the enchanted aviary one evening and see a tiny light glowing outside one of the cages, that is the lantern of the female Dreamer Bird, whose love always burns bright and eternal.