BUBBLES

“Bubbles, Bubbles, Bubbles, please come back to me,
I promise I won’t let you go, I promise I won’t leave.
I hope I see your beak again, rosy peach and pink,
I hope I see you again, I hope more than you can think.
I hope I see your feathers again, black and white and blue,
Because the day your heart stopped beating, my heart stopped beating too.”

- An excerpt from a poem I wrote after Bubbles passed away.

It is said that a part of your heart is left untouched if you’ve never had a pet, and I cant agree more with that statement. I’ve had a few pets over the years, but Bubbles was the one whom I daresay takes up the most space in my heart. He’s practically all of it.

Bubbles was a double-factor violet-masked African lovebird, whom we had gotten from a breeder on April 18th, 2015. He was just a month-old, with a barely grown first batch of feathers. I was in the fifth grade at the time, and I’d never felt happier.

As the years passed, Bubbles and I became the best of friends. I trained him to step onto my hand and my shoulder, fed him his favourite foods with my hands, and made sure he was okay every time thunder or fireworks scared him. I still remember the rains of 2016 when I spent the night next to his cage in the common room even though I was scared of the dark, because I knew he was terrified by the thunder. I talked to him through the night, trying to calm him and ensure he slept well.

I believe that everyone is, above all, just a story, and that there is one place, person or object the story always sets firm roots. That’s what it centres around; no matter how many twists and turns the story takes, it will always come back to that one person (or place or object). Bubbles is the centre of my story.

Time flew. Me and Bubbles were inseparable. The first thing I would do on coming back from school is just rush to him and take him out of the cage and play! He was so tuned to the my time of coming back. The moment he would hear my voice from outside the door, he would go into a flurry of activity and move in circles and chirp like crazy! We have loads and loads of memories together. We brought a big cage for him, so that he had ample space to move around. I would take him out of the cage nad he would be with me for hours. He would sit on my tummy when I read a book. He would walk over me, with that tiny claws of him giving me tickly feeling! I would feed him bird food, and other small bit of leafy veggies allowed for him. I would make my Dad lie down on his tummy and Bubbles would love to walk on his back. I would keep the slinky ring near him, and Bubbles would enter at one end and come out of the other end. I would play Jenga wooden blocks with Bubbles. Memories with him are endless.

I was so much in love with him, at times I asked myself that is it correct to keep a bird in a cage, denying it freedom? Many times I felt, that I should let him free and just let him fly away (keeping a stone on my heart), but I didn't and couldn't do it, as he is a vulnerable species and cannot exist in the wild, he would be immediately predated upon. At least i was giving him all the love and he was loving me as well.

Then, one evening, I was playing with him as I usually did when, all of a sudden, he started fluttering wildly. I won’t go into the details since they’re too painful to remember, but those flutters were spasms. There was nobody at home at the time and my phone had no balance. I was a mess, crying and screaming and banging on my neighbour’s door until she opened it. She called my parents.
We rushed Bubbles to the vet, where he was pronounced dead. June 7, 2019, a day I will never forget.

A lot of people will tell me that that’s where the story ends, but I beg to differ. The sheer, stinging grief I felt after my loss was unlike anything I had ever felt before. I remember losing my appetite and sleep for the next few weeks to even months. I couldn’t focus on any of my studies and on more than one occasion, I ended up breaking down in school. And after those weeks passed, I was hollow; a shell of myself. Losing somebody you’ve loved so dearly is a kind of emptiness you can never truly fill. It’s been a little more than three years since we lost Bubbles, and I still cry almost every other night from all the could-have-beens and if-onlys of his death. “If only I had balance in my phone”, “If only we reached the vet on time”, “If he hadn’t had that cardiac arrest we could have been so happy”, “I could have gotten him a new toy that weekend”, and so on.

I had other people to love, but for Bubbles, I was the only one. I was his entire world, his everything, his home. And so, during the days after his death, I became an abandoned house- with whitewashed walls and all the furniture emptied out- with no sign that anybody had lived in it and loved it. Because a person is only a home if there is someone to love them, and a home is not the same as a house. I have people to love who will love me back, but Bubbles will always be irreplaceable. I think, at the time, his death left me so empty that if I screamed and then listened closely enough, I’d hear echoes from inside myself.

But his death wasn’t in vain, because grief channels itself into art. And the form of art I chose was writing. Today, I have over twenty different poems, letters and stories based on my memories with him, and am still continuing the collection. And more importantly, his loss has made me all the more determined to take care of his kind. Of animals and birds in general. Bubbles deeply inspired me, throughout his life and even after. And if I get to keep up his legacy with writing and taking care of stray animals and all birds, then so be it.