FIELD OBSERVATION: CHILDHOOD
Written in the first person. My voice.
Let me tell you about my first murder. Nothing criminal about it — the victim weighed less than the palm of my hand and was half made of down.
I was seven. Or eight. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that even then I knew the difference between ‘asleep’ and ‘dead’. I knew — and I kept quiet. And, as life went on, that silence became my main habit as an adult.
It happened near the car park. An ordinary courtyard, an ordinary evening. A baby pigeon was lying on the tarmac. Still just a tiny thing, its feathers not yet fluffed out but standing on end — as if it had frozen to death but hadn’t quite had time to cool down yet. Its eyes were half-closed, but not quite shut. It was breathing rarely and weakly, barely perceptibly. I didn’t yet know the word ‘agony’, but I understood: if I walked past it now, it would die right there, under the wheels.
I cupped it in my palm. It turned out to be lighter than I’d expected. Almost weightless. Warm. But it wasn’t the healthy, deep warmth of a chick under its parent’s wing, but a lingering, fleeting warmth — like the warmth of a mitten left out in the frost until the cold has finally seeped through it. I remember that feeling: a warm little lump of life, beating so rarely that you perceive every heartbeat as a miracle.
My fingers closed around it of their own accord — not to grip it, but to shield it. I carried it home up the stairs, to the fifth floor without a lift, thinking of just one thing: not to jolt it. Not to breathe too sharply. Not to trip. Do you know that feeling when you’re carrying a crystal vase and you’re afraid of slipping? That’s exactly how I carried him. It felt as though, if I took a breath too deeply, his heart would stop. I still remember that feeling to this day: carrying something that depends entirely on you. And the fear. The fear of not getting it there safely. It felt heavier than the chick itself. Not just fear, but a primal, clinging dread: I won’t make it. I’ll drop it. It’ll freeze to death. It won’t make it. But I didn’t even consider that I might suffocate it. It felt as though it wasn’t my heart beating in my chest, but his.
I got it home. At home, Mum brought a box, a cloth, and a pipette full of water. I stood there, still holding him in my arms, afraid to put him down — what if he got worse without my warmth? But he died almost straight away. Not an hour later, not ten minutes later. Right there in the palms of my hands. I wasn’t squeezing him. I was just holding him. But, as it turned out, sometimes even just holding him is too much. At some point, his little body stopped resisting — not that he’d been struggling before, but there had been a certain tension of life in him, a faint tremor, a bird-like flutter. And then — nothing. Silence. A second ago he was there, and then he wasn’t. And his body shifted, as if a core had been pulled out of him.
And then I saw them. Tiny red bugs. They were crawling out of the feathers, from under the wings, slowly, sleepily, like tenants being evicted from a flat. As if death were a signal to them: it’s time. As if death were simply a change of tenants. They crawled over my fingers, tiny and wriggling. I didn’t scream. I didn’t brush them off my hands. I just watched as they made their way from the dead calf to the living one. And at that moment I realised something that, at the age of seven, cannot be put into words, but is felt with absolute clarity: death is when you are no longer needed, not even by your own parasites. That is death. The very real kind, with biology, with evidence. Not a dream.
I hadn’t heard her footsteps.
‘He’s fallen asleep,’ Mum said.
She wasn’t lying to me. She was trying to comfort me. To take away from the situation what was too much for a child to bear. She wasn’t afraid for the chick — she was afraid for me. For my tears, for my childish mind, for how to explain to someone who still believes in Father Christmas that the world is such that warmth kills. And she chose the simplest solution: to rename death as sleep. To cross out reality with a single word, so that I wouldn’t cry.
But I already knew. Not because I was some sort of special child. But because sleeping birds don’t let red bugs out of themselves. Sleeping birds breathe. I knew the difference between sleep and death — not with my mind, but with my skin. I knew this at the age of seven. Not because I was a genius. It’s just that death has its own signs, and they don’t ask your age.
But I didn’t want to burden Mum with what I knew. I didn’t want her to worry. Even back then, I realised that sometimes the truth isn’t a gift, but a burden. And if I cried now, if I said ‘he’s dead’, she’d have to do something about it. And she was tired. I could see how tired she was.
So I nodded. I held back my tears with all my might and, I think, even managed a smile — as much as that’s possible when a pigeon’s little corpse is growing cold in your palms. I handed the little body over to someone else’s hands. With little bugs in the folds of its feathers. With a life that was still warm, but already someone else’s. She took from me what I could no longer hold on to. What I had already killed.
‘Yes, Mum. He’s fallen asleep.’
I think it’s at moments like these that childhood ends. Not when you realise that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, but when you consciously choose to lie for the first time — not for personal gain, not out of fear of punishment, but out of care. To protect the one who is trying to protect you. It’s a monstrously adult thing to do. And it brings no rewards. Just a quiet, gnawing realisation: the world is such that sometimes empathy for another requires you to switch off all empathy for yourself. You become a vessel for a reality that no one else wants to see. A silent repository for the maggots crawling out of a dead body. And you smile. And you nod. And you carry it all within you — to the nearest bin, which you’ll then give a wide berth.
Over the following weeks, I kept checking the bins near my house. I knew that dead birds were wrapped in newspaper and thrown away. I was afraid of finding a bundle — it seemed that if I saw the remains, all my lies, my little lifesaving lies, would be in vain. I didn’t know the word ‘guilt’ back then, but I felt it with every fibre of my being. I kept going over the same question in my head: perhaps my concern had been too strong? Perhaps, to avoid killing it, I should have walked past? It was my first killing. A bird, suffocated by the heat. It wasn’t on purpose, but the fact remains: I was so desperate to save it that I didn’t realise I’d cut off its last breath of air. My concern had become a cage.
Many years have passed since then. I haven’t avoided rubbish bins for a long time now. But that fear hasn’t gone away. It’s ceased to be a fear of a newspaper roll and has become a fear of my own concern. A fear that my empathy might prove fatal. Years went by, and whenever someone said ‘everything’s fine’ whilst I could see red bugs crawling out of every crack, I’d nod. I wouldn’t argue. I’d smile and say, ‘Yes, of course. Everything’s fine.’ Because my mum taught me that sometimes love means going along with a lie. Sometimes caring means tucking your knowledge away and pretending the baby bird is asleep.
Years later, I realised: pity without the ability to let go is murder. Caring without the readiness to face death is a lie.
I’m not blaming Mum. If you’re reading this, I’m not angry. You said what you said out of love.
But I’m simply stating the fact: her love required me to lie. And I went along with that lie to spare her the worry she’d feel for me. Because sometimes the truth is like red bugs crawling from a dead body onto your palms. And sharing it means passing those bugs on to someone else. Sometimes it’s right to keep quiet. Sometimes it’s right to lie. But you pay a price for that ‘right’. You pay with the loneliness of knowing.
Mum has probably long since forgotten that incident. Or perhaps she remembers, but in her version there was a baby bird that ‘fell asleep, and we let it go in the park’. I don’t ask. What’s the point? She doesn’t need the truth. She needed a calm daughter, and that’s what she got. I played my part. The bird played its part. The beetles did their job and burrowed back into the earth.
But now, so many years later, I want to say this out loud. Quietly. Without shouting. Just to state the fact. I’ve never told anyone this. But now I will.
I knew it then. I know it now. I’ve carried this knowledge through my whole life, just as I carried that baby bird — in a cupped hand, afraid of dropping it. And I didn’t drop it. I carried it through. It’s just that the cost of delivery turned out to be higher than I’d thought.
And the red bugs are long gone. They left only a slight itch on my skin, which returns every time I try to save someone. And this ‘someone’ didn’t even ask for it.
The baby bird didn’t fall asleep. And I don’t think I did either. I just learnt to close my eyes and breathe evenly, so that no one would worry.
Later, my mother clarified: I was three and a half, not seven. It was a sparrow, not a pigeon. And there was no elevator in that building—only steep stairs. I didn’t know these details when I wrote the piece. My brain had filled them in on its own, swapping the facts but preserving the essence. And the essence remains unchanged. The details have faded, but I remember the main thing—what I felt.
