The Cardinal

“I remember reading that more than 300,000 babies are born everyday,” Crystal said, tucking a strand of her golden-blonde hair behind her ear.

Crystal and I were at the city park, sitting cross-legged in the grass.

“Whenever I see a baby picture of myself, I just want to cry,” I said.

“I’m the same way and I don’t understand it,” Crystal replied. “I get super emotional. My mom made me a memory book filled with baby pictures and stuff and I can’t open it without weeping.”

We were both in our mid-twenties and neither of us had jobs but that was okay because what we were doing, sitting there in the park felt important.

We'd met one another in the Psychiatric Ward located on the third floor at Community Hospital East, the two of us in gowns and non-slip socks, endlessly lamenting the hospital policy that disallowed caffeine for behavioral health patients.

And while decaf was available in the day room, we so longed for a caffeine fix, that during the afternoon shift-change one Sunday, I distracted the nurse-on-duty while Crystal slipped behind the counter and filled two Styrofoam cups with regular coffee from the carafe reserved for staff.

And while we weren’t allowed shoelaces, belts, books, pencils or privacy, at that moment, as Crystal divided up the coffee among the patients in the day room, each of us getting a splash, there were smiles all around; smiles that might have been dormant for years.

After we'd sat in the grass for about about half an hour, Crystal and I relocated to a picnic table so as to avoid a just-begun soccer match between a pair of boys, one of whom was advancing the ball towards a toppled-over waste barrel while his buddy guarded the trash-filled opening as if it were a goal.

“Every night,” I said, “I use the text-to-speech function on my phone to listen to Siri read articles as I try to fall asleep,” I said. “And, as I toss and turn, waiting for the Ambien to kick in, I'm just filled with dread."

"It's those little deaths that I fear the most," Crystal said. "All the time I've spent waiting for something to happen, as if my true life had yet to begin."

The boy playing offense let out a whoop after landing a shot into the trash barrel, agitating a cloud of sugar-crazed bees that had been buzzing around the discarded soda cans and half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwiches held inside.

I thought of a documentary I'd watched about bees. Through dance, a bee be can convey the location of nectar, its quality and its space relative to the sun.

Taking the asphalt trail through the wooded area in the back of the park, our faces were lit intermittently as we stepped from shadow into the beams of light that danced through the swaying limbs of White Oak and Sugar Maple trees.

“I wonder if this is what Indiana looked like, you know, before white people arrived,” I said as, all around us, the trees and foliage were doing the work of turning sunlight into oxygen.

As we rounded a curve, nearing the end of the trail, we came upon an injured bird.

“Oh my god,” Crystal said, kneeling down beside the broken bird. A baby cardinal

“She must have fallen from the nest,” Crystal said as the distressed creature writhed, making spastic attempts to work her wings.

“What should we do,” I asked, kneeling beside Crystal.

Crystal, began to speak to the bird as if casting a spell or praying, saying, “You are loved and I’m sorry this happened to you.”

And when the bird passed, Crystal said, "in this exact moment, I know that somewhere, something else was born."

And as Crystal and I stood up, a large dense cloud passed overhead, briefly obscuring the sun offering, a moment of solace, a moment of shadow.

I put my arm around Crystal.

And in this way, I felt the universe shiftt ever so slightly.

The Cardinal

JUSTIN D. OAKLEY