Hummingbird

I glance over the crowded train car and identify the two giggly girls as my safest option. As I ask if I can sit next to her, the blonde one quickly scoops up her bag and says, “Of course!”

It’s late, I’m on my way home from the city to my cardboard suburban town. The train is charged with Saturday energy, a boozy, thick flow of chatter and afterthoughts.

Having to listen to people’s conversations on the train exhausts me, and I try to drown them out with music and podcasts. The “circling back” of inhuman business speak alternates with pop-psychology buzzword ping-pong – all the triggers, toxicity and resulting trauma. Occasionally, a Tourette’s tick of awesome takes hold. Oh, awesome! Yeah, it was awesome! He’s really awesome! Awesome idea! This is when the volume of my earphones can’t go high enough.

The girl next to me speaks in that delicious, rolling Latin American accent that is inimitable. I love the sound of it; it makes the dullest mundanity sound better. She wiggles her sparkly high-heeled sandals impatiently to punctuate sentences. She endows every word with spare vowels, stretching them out leisurely, embellishing the English.

She’s talking about her grandfather, who loved birds. He was always out in his garden, she says, with the birds. He fed them and took care of them. “See this bird?” she asks her friend, twisting her ankle for the friend to see. “It’s a hummingbird, because of him. I got it before he died.” Ah-ming-bird, she intones.

I imagine a dense, tangled garden at the foot of a stone-walled house. A clay-tiled roof holding itself over the terrace like a fretful umbrella. A hazy golden evening light that makes specks of dust sit in the air as if suspended in amber. There is the grandfather, by a mosaic table on a single twisted leg, like a wrought iron beanstalk. All around him are bird feeders hung like magic lanterns. His wrinkled hands hold a thin porcelain coffee cup he doesn’t dare sip from as he watches a tiny bird quiver its long, needle-thin beak over a tray of sugar water.

The girl goes on, saying they even buried him with a bird. I imagine this touching, everyday common pharaoh, holding a hummingbird to his chest in his small, shriveled hands as they close the coffin and lower him down.

It was recently her father’s birthday, the girl shares, and they were all there, the whole family, with her on a video call. Having so much fun, she says, without me, while I’m here. All of them having this great party in Colombia, and I’m watching from here.

I see the video call - the family gathered by the large table on the terrace, the outdoor lights bright against the velvet curtain of the Andean night. Everyone is laughing and talking all at once, throwing their arms over one another, waving wine glasses at the camera, sucking on cigars. Someone’s fiddling with a guitar in the background. They are all right there, yet entirely inaccessible, a taunting image in a crystal ball. I’ve had so many versions of this video call myself.

The conversation shifts to men. The Colombian girl is remembering a boyfriend, “He was half Chinese and half American”, she says. “Was he cute?” the friend wants to know. The girl pauses momentarily and solemnly concludes that yes, he was. Then it’s onto another boy that’s after her. The friend interjects with her only concern – is this one cute? “Yes, but he’s a year younger than me. I don’t want a child!” the girl says, and I have to bite back a grin. All those comments about Russians being winter Latinas come back to me, and I think about how often I’ve heard this sentiment from my Slavic girlfriends.

The girl goes on about a good-looking promoter she’s friends with – very tall, “like a giraffe”. The friend intervenes to confirm whether he is cute. He is. However, this one is a scandalous four years younger, so out of the question entirely.

There’s a lightness to her, a melodious way of being, an enjoyment of herself as a young woman you so rarely see here. She likes the parties she goes to, the nails she’s taken time to paint, the dress she’s wearing, she likes herself. She doesn’t sound bitter, or disillusioned. She sounds like a fierce romantic in her feminine armor, looking for her hero. The kind grandpa with his hummingbirds would approve of.

The dingy train’s windows are murky. They look like ox bladders stretched across the frames of a 16^th century hut, pre-glass. Crumpled passengers are slumped against worn brown faux leather seats. This glittery, passionate girl illuminates the space around her. A beacon of something sincere, vital, yearning to live and to feel.

As I get off to change trains, the hummingbird on her ankle lifts and follows, flickering at the edge of my vision. For days after, it glints in window reflections, shivers in the rustle of leaves, flares in the swing of a stranger’s earrings – a messenger from another world, always just out of reach.