The Bluebird in My Heart

Singing into hollow ribs: On tenderness and survival

There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, and sobbing under hot water in a hotel shower in Spain….I knew then that this bird was mine. That it has become a mirror, a companion, a soul-mark.

Anyone who knows me knows I have been curating my ‘brand’ since adolescence. It consists of Monet paintings, traveling, writing, olives, and bluebirds.

Bluebirds have been somewhat of a new addition within the last 5 years yet they are the first thing I have consciously claimed as mine.

Monet felt instinctive, like something etched into me before I understood beauty. Writing felt innate, like breath.

But bluebirds…bluebirds feel soulful. They don’t just belong to me—I belong to them a little, too.

Charles Bukowski, a controversial German-American poet, wrote Bluebird in 1992.

It begins:

“there’s a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I’m too tough for him,

I say, stay in there, I’m not going

to let anybody see

you.”

I could analyze every line—every pang—but I won’t. Because this poem deserves your own reflection, your own unraveling. What I will say is: I feel it. The suppression of emotion. The quiet hiding of softness. The pity that grows when you’ve made a home out of solitude. The grief of feelings that never get to fully live—or fully die. I like to imagine the cage in his poem is made of ribs. I hope it’s not iron or cold. Maybe, the bluebird pecks gently at the tissue of his heart.

I say this because the bird in my heart does this.

There was a point in my life—still tender in memory—when I stood in a hotel shower in Spain and recited this poem aloud to myself—sobbing, trying and failing to keep my composure. And yet, no one was around. In tragic incoherence I kept repeating:

“there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out…”

I wept for how hard I am on him. For all the times I’ve silenced him. For all the times the bird in my heart has cried for me.

Between us, what hurts me the most is that I couldn't protect my own heart, let alone the bluebird inside. The creature meant to peck at my heart found nothing left to wound. There was nothing left of me. No heart to pierce, no emotion to draw out—I was hollowed clean. I, too, was trapped in a cage, teetering on the edge of drowning in whiskey, waiting for the flood to clean what little remained.

That night my last words were:

“at night sometimes

when everybody's asleep.

I say, I know that you're there,

so don't be

sad.

then I put him back,

but he's singing a little

in there, I haven't quite let him

die

and we sleep together like

that”

---

Tethered to Something Beautiful

When I was 18, I spent a couple weeks in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time I went on a boat tour which was gorgeous in itself. However, I couldn’t help shake my attention from the Tree Swallows that were following our boat. Tree Swallows have a blue back, and are my own blue birds.

I remember the feeling vividly—still close my eyes and call it back like a spell. The way they danced and fluttered through the air, striving to match the boat’s speed, as if we were trying not to lose each other. I felt like we were tethered in that moment. Both of us trying to stay. Their playful spirit holding my heart, nursing the bird in my heart to life.

I was (and still am) mesmerized by their flickering ease, their weightless grace, the way they playfully skimmed the air like it was made just for them. Like they were asking for you to join.

Since then, I’ve kept a Tree Swallow in my heart.

My reminder to keep trying to catch up with something beautiful—even if it’s just for a moment.

Not all birds that live in my heart are bluebirds, but some carry the same spirit.

D.H. Lawrence wrote:

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

It’s not a bluebird exactly, but it lives in the same part of me. I return to it often—this small, unsentimental truth. It captures, in just a few lines, the stark difference between nature and human society.

Nature is not gentle, but it is honest. It doesn’t ask for mercy or meaning. The creatures within it do not plead, they endure.

Humans, on the other hand, question everything—especially when silence would serve us better. We ask why when we could be asking how. We reach for explanations instead of resolutions.

A bird on a frozen bough does not ask why the cold has come. It has no answer to how to stop it. So it stays. It endures. It does not pity itself for what it cannot change.

And I—I will not be sorry for what I cannot control. I will act when I can, or I will remain still. I will sit on that bough in the cold, unflinching, having never once felt sorry for myself.

Maybe we all carry birds inside us—tender things trying to outlast the cold, the cage, and the whisky.