It turned out that the girl my best friend had been talking to wasn’t just a friend, although nobody was really surprised. There was an explosion of phone calls when the news dropped and people were patting him on the back and telling him they were proud of him. All the praise didn’t matter much to him, though – he would’ve kept it a secret for his whole life if it meant he got to hold that girl’s hand and bring her to movie theatres.

            When the girl had to go away for a couple of weeks to visit family, I tried to keep him occupied, but it was obvious I couldn’t fill that space for him. I waited in line in the morning to get a new video game from his favourite series, but he said he didn’t feel like playing. Eventually, when he was looking out the window, a little parrot-type bird materialized out of his chest and started flying and singing around the room. It had an orange head with a green body and a heart shape emblazoned into the feathers on its belly. It started to fly around the room, so I had to catch it, and then I put it in the old birdcage my best friend had gotten with me at a garage sale years ago.

            He was all in a mope about the whole situation, so I took care of the bird. It kept pecking at the walls, looking out the window, singing melodies that almost sounded like words. I went to the supermarket to buy it normal birdseed, but it refused to eat it. The only thing it would accept was the strawberries I had left on the kitchen counter and some stale chocolate we kept in the fridge. I gave the bird new toys to play with, bought him a bigger cage, replaced the newspaper on the floor of the cage. One of our other friends had a bird of his own fly out of his chest when he asked a girl out; he came over and we tried to get the two birds to play together, but they ignored each other. That really bummed out my best friend, so that day I ordered takeout pizza. Afterwards, we sat outside on those plastic chairs and talked while the summer night fog settled down on us.

            The night before the girl was supposed to come back, I woke up to the bird going crazy in its cage, squawking and banging its head on the walls. I gave it all the leftover chocolate I had, but when that didn’t work, I let it out of the cage and watched it fly around the room before exhausting itself and settling down on the couch. I kept watching it, sat there with just the two of us in the dark for hours until it wandered back into its cage.

            The most adorable thing about it all was that when the girl came back, she had with her a little blue parrot of her own that she had kept the whole time she was away and carried in the car ride back. When the two birds met, we let them out of their cages. They flew into each other and tumbled into a heart shape in the air before glowing and vanishing. My best friend smiled like he hadn’t in the time she had been away – they went out together for the rest of the day, so I cleaned the empty cage before putting it and the bird toys back into the dusty storage cabinet I had found them in. I remember wishing the bird had looked back at me before flying off, but it didn’t.

            When I got a bird of my own, it was in a summer camp cabin, where it was raining outside. I started coughing up feathers before the bird crawled its way out of my mouth. The other guy had taken his clothes already and left. The bird launched itself out of my mouth before crashing into the windowpane and falling into the puddle of rainwater that had been left behind when we came in through the door, a mass of red on the wooden floor.

            In the dark, it really could’ve been anything.