(Corvus brachyrhynchos)
I
I clock 50 miles an hour down our hilly mile-long driveway — avoiding our chickens — outrunning anticipation of my lungs clinging to old air from another time.
“I’m so glad you’re home!” she says. She hangs on me, rubbing my leg like a cat leans in. I’m allergic. Panicked by her touch. I gasp at inconsistent snorkels of air.
“Me too,” I lie, but don’t lie.
“It’s so beautiful here today,” I say.
I look out our glass walls into September, ink-black crows and leaves like pumpkins coloring the landscape in time for Halloween. I look around at the life we’ve built. I gently touch things making sure all is solid, still real.
“Can you believe we created this?” she says, asking without asking. No.
I wheel my bag to the bedroom. She comes up behind me. Quiet. Aggressive. She slides her hands up under my shirt. Skin. Holding my chest and me from behind. Resting her head on my shoulder, reassuring herself it still fits. “I missed you so much,” she says, drinking me.
I vanish, becoming the crow that’s hardly visible on the far-off horizon as she pushes my naked body, not me, onto our bed.
II
A crow is a mid-sized ink black bird. The word “crow” is used both as part of the common name of many species and collectively for all raptor-type birds.
When I was a kid my dad rescued a crow on the side of the road and mended him back to health. The neighbors hated that crow, named “Crow,” because he would dive bomb their grills and steal their backyard Sunday food.
I was fascinated by the freedom of that bird. I longed to fall from the sky.
III
Tell me this: does gayness lie dormant? Is it at times only as visible as a crow flying through a dark night? Does it then emerge, like puberty? Like the sunrise? Does it rise up naturally only to get pushed back down by society, sometimes so abruptly nobody even knows it happened?
I want to know.
Tell me this: how do you reconcile the time before you were aware of something that always was but was not? How do you hold on to beauty that was created amidst pain? How do you forgive yourself? How do you get over lost time?
I want to know.
IV
Sometimes I convince myself of dates and times and moments and scenes. In the sixth-grade locker room, standing naked and erect, looking at that boy Kevin? I told myself I just wanted to look like the other boys. To discard my lard-padded body for theirs. I classified my same-sex attraction as a type of envy.
Maybe on our first anniversary, when I abruptly left my marriage for a month? I was positive I had to leave. I had no idea why. I can’t remember anything of that time other than my ravenous desire to put it all back together, which I did.
People in my life were not homophobic. I don’t even remember knowing that word. Unlike so many others, I would not have faced repercussions from my family had I known and revealed my true self. This might be what’s most confusing. Confusion is hard to rank.
When awareness finally came, depression was by then so thick in me I could no longer breathe.
I’m unsure how many nights I spent so close to the edge of our almost-twenty-year bed. For months, at least, I lay stiff as wood and totally limp, praying she wouldn’t touch me. I’d rise in the nakedness of morning, shoulders locked in pain, devastated my prayer had come true. Unlikely pairings. Praying she wouldn’t, devastated she didn’t.
That’s why I came out.
I long for the clarity other people seem to have. The knowing from a young age of who they are and what they desire. Nearly every gay man I know talks of knowing.
I am hungry to know how I didn’t know.
V
One decade ago, a Sunday, crows began committing suicide all around me. Their limp, dense bodies. The cleanup. Trying to wipe the glass nearly every day. I didn’t plan for any of this when I removed all those walls the second week after we moved in. The crows lived in the oak trees of the 200-acre prairie that has grown for eternity just below the ridge where our house sat revealing what everyone enviously described as an airplane view. They came one by one. Kites, graceful and controlled. Once in my line of sight, I waited. Sometimes counting my breaths. One. Two. Smack.
The first time I asked for a divorce, I forgot to speak. I don’t know how many times I failed, but I know for sure it took more than two years to say that one word. Many times, I got close. But then I’d knock myself out trying again only to wake up dazed and still within the context of a beautiful life that no longer worked.
Crow smacks come in two forms. Dead, and not dead. I learned to understand the difference by sound, a decibel mile marker between life and death. Early on, clean up began immediately. Smack to shovel to funeral in under five minutes. The time for mourning shortened after repeating the experience multiple times in a single hour.
Once I said it, things moved quickly. Married to separated to gone in under five months. The times I spoke silently are what I regret most. The non-responses. My body present but my spirit gone. Her increased familiarity with my crow-carcass posture.
I tried hanging stained glass. I tried an “Ultrasonic Solar Animal Repeller” that advertised a “sophisticated PIR system detecting movement, triggering a burst of powerful ultrasonic sound and intense flashing light, chasing away any unwanted animal guests.”
But all I got was audible death and my money back.
I was desperate to figure how to save them, us, like those safety nets below the Golden Gate Bridge.
I tried telling her on a cliff, the jagged rocks of Bonny Doon beach. I tried telling her in a house in the Redwoods. I tried in front of the giant glass walls revealing the prairie.
I finally said what I’d already demonstrated a thousand different ways on a Friday in June a few years after the crows died.
VI
10:40 pm. Election news kept me awake longer than I wanted. It had been two years since she left. Or I left. Semantics. I’m still startled when I realize nobody knows, after almost two decades of the opposite, where I am. Nobody is looking for me. Nobody is waiting for me.
These moments arrive less often but truth is constant. I walk from the couch to the bedroom. Sometimes I act out in defiance and don’t turn off the lights. I stay up all night and sleep all day. Sometimes I don’t bother sleeping. Nobody else cares, so why should I?
The dead crows have long since been discarded. My bed is made. No one but me has stepped foot in my house for more than a month. The scenes are set and I’m ready. For what?
I dock the phone on my dresser across the room because I’m told I’ll sleep better. Now I stand there naked nearly every night scrolling one more time before walking away.
VII
Years after my coming out, at an art show on the corner of Broadway and Belmont, crows began to show up again. Painted with a quick hand on white canvas.
I walked two full Chicago Lakeview blocks, now my neighborhood, looking at art and talking with the artists.
The crows followed me.
Sculpture: Metal. Clay. Melted yarn. Felt.
Paintings: Oil. Watercolor. Manipulated photography.
The crows were everywhere — balancing on high wires, part of city scenes, flocked together on trees, perched alone on a single telephone pole. I passed a murder of crows, as they are referred to in group. But it wasn’t until I found the single crow falling from the sky that I remembered the mystery, the longing I’d held for thirty years, to fall from the sky with the freedom that crow had, to break rules and tell the truth and live in authentic freedom. I wound back through the booths, this time aware and confused, bombarded by the ink black crows and the certainty that everything was changing again.
I never imagined healing would take so long. Come so fast.
VIII
Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain
IX
My friend calls once a week to check up on me.
“She’s forgetting about me,” I say. That’s what I thought I wanted, in the heat of us, on those thousand days where I couldn’t be certain I was alive, watching the crows die, unsure who was the unlucky one. Now, all the change I longed for is happening and yet here I am clinging desperately to fragments of who we were. To want and not want is so confusing.
“Oh honey,” my friend says.
To suffer from my ex-wife’s distance, when I’m the one who wanted out, feels forbidden.
Our divorce documents sat at the lawyer’s office, undone, for more than two years.
I sat naked and undone much longer.
“I’m not her priority now,” I say.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
These emotions are like a bad roommate, showing up at the worst time.
“It’s been years and I’m still sad all the time,” I say.
But it’s not all sad. I can feel myself becoming sturdy in my aloneness. I am happier, yet I still plan my caffeine intake and days around the depression that fogs up and slows down everything.
“I am so proud of how far you’ve come,” my friend says.
X
Cleaning up dead crows is ugly. Necessary. Brutal.
XI
Crows have long symbolized death. Crows feed on dead animals and moods — myths surrounding the crow compound over generations, passed around camp grounds and tepees and from my grandmother to me. The crow symbolizes War. Misfortune.
At least, that’s what some say.
But not my grandmother. She believed people misunderstood the crow, misidentified its presence and falsely labeled the experience as bad. Dark. Ominous.
Instead, she explained that when you see a crow it means a change is coming.
The crow is a spirit animal representing mystery and magic. The power of this bird, it is said, provides insight and is a means of supporting intentions.
A sign of luck.
A knower of deception, the crow recognizes tricksters and bullshitters before a human ever could. It’s also said that if the crow chooses you, he will support you in developing the power of sight, transformation, authenticity and connection.
XII
A man recently looked deep into the far back of me and said, “I love you, keep going.”
XIII
In the aftermath of the year I barely survived, my therapist gave me a black leather Moleskine. Within it I kept track of my rehabilitation, just like my mom re-learning to see after her blood smacked a highway back in ‘95.
“Divide the pages into three columns,” my therapist instructed.
I sat each evening, often naked, in my new white leather chair. New pen. New lamps. New kitchen. New city. New life. Some days I couldn’t wear the new clothes as they made my body less familiar, although I’d done my best to alter that also, covering it in black ink nobody understood.
For a number of years, I did not count how many, I woke in the mornings with amnesia.
Where am I?
Who am I?
In pursuit of truth, I discarded so much. I thought everything had to go. I hadn’t even kept my black dog. I stumbled around bewildered at an entirely new life.
In my Moleskine, I followed the therapist’s instructions, writing each day about new places I explored, new people I met and the awareness of this new life that I was consciously building.
We began each session exactly the same. “Did you bring your Moleskine?”
I passed it to him. He read aloud, “New places: Coffee shop on Clark. Boys Town. Melrose for breakfast. Montrose beach. Oakdale dry cleaners. 57th Street Books. Weekend in Saugatuck.”
“New People: Barista with the red beard. Doorman on Astor. Yoga instructor. Walgreens clerk. Hot guy in bookstore, center aisle.”
“New understandings: Always have a plan for Friday night. Don’t hold another man’s hand past Division Street. Labels make everything easier. Condoms necessary, but for different reasons. Still a good dad.”
Two in the morning, awake in raw panic with sweat-soaked sheets, I would flip back through the pages to remind myself of my progress.
One day, he didn’t take the Moleskine.
“What are you eating?” he asked. “Are you cooking?”
The next week, no Moleskine.
“Are you grocery shopping? When is the last time you did laundry?”
Before our next session, he texted: “In place of our usual spot, meet me @ 667 W. Diversey, 7 PM.”
I arrived early. He knocked on my window. “Let’s go in and get you some food.” I didn’t move. He climbed into the passenger seat. I stared at the storefront. My hands shook. I gripped the wheel hoping he wouldn’t notice. He reached over and held me. Tears clouded my vision. “We’re going to re-learn how,” he assured me.
He opened my car door. I gripped the wheel. He placed his hand on my shoulder. I resisted. We watched family after family come and go. They looked just like mine had.
He pulled at me. I put one foot on the ground. Then the other. He shut the door behind me. Smack. He propped me up. We went slow. Progressed quickly.
Turns out, single people should only buy one avocado at a time.
XIV
I read an article about a man who lost his wedding ring on the soccer field at his kid’s weekend game. He loved that ring and all it represented. He searched for hours and asked the maintenance team to help. Five months later the maintenance team found it on a piece of equipment.
I notice my bare hand and the ring-shaped indent in my skin. Maybe it’s permanent.
XV
No one asks — not my ex-wife, my daughter, my best friends, my parents, or anyone else — when did you know, come to know? What was it like holding a man’s hand the first time? Where did you find the courage? You upended your whole life, tell me about how that feels? Are you proud? What happened to those crows? What does that feel like? What does that feel like? What does that feel like?
XVI
Crows are among the world’s most intelligent animals. Recent research has found a crow is capable of not only tool use, but also tool construction.
Turns out, me as well.
During these years since those crow suicides, I’ve been reconciled. The con-man, the masks, the distraction. The belief in what I was told and what I told myself.
Now, the promise of the crow: sight, transformation, connection. The crow found the wounds in me, the bullshitter, the closet dweller, and stole them like our neighbor’s backyard Sunday food.
If people ever did ask what it’s like now, I’d say it feels like home. Like falling from the sky.
Like the bullet that killed Harvey Milk is still lodged deep in me. Like Grace, my grandmother’s name.
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First published in Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall 2020), Michigan State University Press.
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I love you. Keep going.
Tyler