BIRDS OF THE TWILIGHT

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For seven days I was possessed by hiccups.

They arrived without warning, small convulsions rising from somewhere below language. Every few seconds my body jerked like an old engine trying to start. Sleep became impossible. Food turned into an obstacle course. Conversation fractured into little explosions.

By the fourth day I began to suspect that the hiccups were not a medical problem at all, but a form of communication.

Each spasm seemed to release another flock of birds into my mind.

At first there were only a few. Black silhouettes crossing a green sky. Then hundreds. Then thousands. Red birds, white birds, blue birds, birds written in calligraphy, birds made of coral branches and Sanskrit letters. They poured across mountains, rivers, and caverns hidden inside a vast translucent face that seemed to be both my own skull and the living body of the earth.

In the center of this landscape sat a small figure in meditation.

Every hiccup sent another wave of birds through the scene. They nested in the forests of the lungs, circled the chambers of the heart, and disappeared into the caves behind the eyes. The mountains were made of thought. The rivers were nerves. The birds were impulses of consciousness taking flight before they could become words.

By the sixth day I no longer felt ill.

I felt as if I were watching creation happen in real time.

The world was not built from solid objects but from repeating marks, tiny gestures laid one upon another until forests, animals, and human beings emerged from the same restless script.

On the seventh day I was given a small tablet of Thorazine.

Within an hour the hiccups stopped.

The birds did not vanish, but they settled into the trees and folded their wings.

The mountain face remained.

The meditating figure remained.

The luminous sun still glowed among the roots and stones.

I understood then that the medicine had not destroyed the vision. It had only quieted the turbulence long enough for me to see what had been there all along.

The world is a vast aviary of signs.

Consciousness is a flock moving through matter.

And every once in a while, when the body stutters and the mind loses its ordinary rhythm, the birds of twilight rise and reveal the hidden landscape from which they come.