maría, a bird

“I want to die young,” she says, her words quick and dancing like the Spanish she speaks. Her dark eyes glitter mischievously even through my laptop screen.

“How young?” I’m meant to be helping her with English grammar but taking a sharp turn from the lesson plan into winding conversations like this isn’t uncommon for us.

“Oh, like, seventy-five, maybe eighty, tops.”

“That’s only twenty more years, right? Stop.”

“I’ve lived enough by then. I don’t want to lose freedom from my body growing old, things like that.”

Feeling useless and isolated during the pandemic, I applied to be an ESL tutor through an organization in the city. A few months later, here I am, sitting on my floor talking about life and death through a computer screen with María.

María came to the U.S. from Mexico young and alone. Over the next twenty years she lived between worlds, missing her home while building another. Never married and without children, her dreams are of travel. Freedom. Glittering cities and windswept coasts. When our lesson plans prompt me to ask silly questions like, “If you could be any animal, what would you be?” she’s the kind of woman who immediately answers, “A bird.”

There’s something special about being a young woman and connecting with a woman who has lived so much more; it arises some kind of intrinsic and immediate camaraderie that can’t be explained, only felt. Our conversations fill me up.

“I look at you and you have everything, right?” she says to me once. “You are young, with family and a career for yourself. You are free.”

Her words are jarring to me. I think about them a lot.

It’s a summer evening and the sunlight filters through my window and stretches across these pages beautifully. A

golden hour glow. My tea mug is filled and steaming, and I’m propped up against the pillows on my couch while I try to find the words to explain this vague nagging sensation eating me from the inside out. I am craving something, left unfulfilled by a gap I don’t know how to fill.

I don’t feel free.

You have everything, right? You are free. ***

Women are scrutinized in impossible ways, our existence pinned down into too much or too little. In relationships I was always too much — too much emotion, too many opinions, not enough chill. Whittle yourself down into something less demanding, I was told.

In life I’m always doing too little. I’m a woman who never could decide on a career path in a society that conflates selfworth with profession. I blame myself usually — I should do more. Haven’t accomplished enough. Not grateful enough for everything I have. Must check more off a bucket list. Prove I’m something. My softness and empathy and creativity aren’t considered skills in this world. Weren’t we always told that to succeed we’d have to change ourselves? Weren’t we always

shown that everything feminine is undervalued and underpaid and simply not enough?

The world we’ve built is harsh. If I didn’t know better, I’d call it unforgiving. We sit behind screens and don’t remember the last time we had enough time off. We don’t watch the sunset and we don’t sit around tables with food and laughter and flowing wine unless we’ve carved out an hour for it a few

Women are scrutinized in impossible ways, our existence pinned down into too much or too little. In relationships I was always too much — too much emotion, too many opinions, not enough chill.

weeks in advance. We try to monetize every. last. creative. endeavor. We think we’ll be happy when.

We were taught to cage ourselves. We were never taught to ask— how do I live true to myself? ***

“Are you happy?” I ask María once.

She pauses and considers the question. Looks me square in the eye.

“Not really, no.”

“Why not?”

“I miss my family, my mother. And I always feel like there is something I should be doing. You know, a kind of reason for being here. I don’t have it.”

I look at her and see the bravest woman, full of life, the influence of her story on my own so clear and purposeful. I look at her and see a reflection of myself. I see all of us — the women who push back against how they were told to live, the women who are shaking and afraid but do it differently anyway. The women who find a home within, despite everything trying to keep them from themselves.

We get lost out there trying to make something of ourselves. But what if we could see our entire lives stretching out ahead of us? If time became stretchy and elastic and we could see everything before it happened? Every year we’ll work at a certain job. Going on that trip we always dreamed of, finally. The heartbreak that tears the ground from beneath us and makes our hearts ache every night. Another evening at home with tea and the dishwasher running soothingly in the background. A night out, laughing with friends. Loss and celebration and hope and mundanity. Sleep, and a new day.

We don’t watch the sunset and we don’t sit around tables with food and laughter and flowing wine unless we’ve carved out an hour for it a few weeks in advance.

If we saw it all before it happened to us, would we be less afraid? Would we breathe a sigh of relief without the pressure of becoming? Without the pressure of conforming? Would we live our stories freely as they play out, knowing that every inevitable moment is part of something larger?

But we don’t know what will happen next. There’s a beauty in that mystery if we can get past the fear of it. If we can remember that every second belongs to us and we are free to do what we will with it. If we can forget how society and the people around us make us think we should be living  — how do we live as we would if we had no mental handcuffs? What would we do? How would we think and act and speak and love and rage?

Women like María, whether they know it or not, are a compass for women like me. She says she feels like she doesn’t have a reason for being here, yet she keeps living the bravest life I’ve ever heard of. She wants the freedom of a

bird to soar and travel. She’s made a pact with herself to live as fully as she can now, every single day, so that when she grows old she will know she’s lived enough. She takes up space. She fights to uncage herself and be free.

María shows me that living my story is enough. That no matter what happens, every one of us has a depth that can’t be touched, something strong and resolute in our core that nothing and no one can take from us.

Women like María remind me that we can be free.

But what if we could see our entire lives stretching out ahead of us? If time became stretchy and elastic and we could see everything before it happened?

By Mel Rie