Feathers of Truth
One of my earliest memories is that of a delicate baby blue feather, ever so slowly inching its way towards me through the sky, coming closer and closer until it was only an arm’s length away, begging for me to grab. When I reached my hand out to touch it, to feel its gentle stroke before it landed on the ground, however, it abruptly blew away, the wind snatching it from my reaching hands. I turned to watch it go, but by the time I did, it had changed completely, now tinted an aggressive red.
That night I remember crying myself to sleep, the image of the feather sailing towards the ground replaying over and over in my mind. In my sleep, I dreamt of that feather. I also dreamt of my mother.
She told me all I would ever have to know about truth. Truth, not lies. Because the truth, it turns out, is never as simple as others make it out to be; so much trickier to know than a lie. Truth is messy, she told me then. It burns. It stains. It sways. It gets blown away. It changes its colours. It dies and gets reborn, a phoenix rising from its ashes over and over until at some point, it never returns, staying buried in the ground, disintegrated from the beauty it used to be. Just like a feather.
A feather would belong to something bigger to begin with, it always did, but at some point, it found its way alone, sailing through the sky, no authority over where it might go. It wasn’t in control anymore; not when it was disconnected from its origin. It was on its very own out in the great big world. How people perceived it, how people changed it and twisted it for their own, it was all something that feather itself no longer had control over.
Eventually, the feather would fall to the ground, and what it was then could no longer be changed. When inspected closely, traces of its origin could still be found, but it wasn’t the same anymore. And so, my mother told me, truth was never as simple as falling, as just like that feather I so clearly remember, it changes directions, it changes colours. It was never the same. And neither was she.
The next morning when I awoke, my bed was brimming with feathers, weighing down on me all at once. Large ones of a peacock, small ones of sparrows. The one that flew towards me however, it was a delicate baby blue.
This time, this time I leapt forward and snatched it midair, just in case the wind would try and swipe it away from between my fingers once again. In my hand, landed a Cardinal, a baby blue feather embedded in its back between its bright red pelt—a piece of truth hidden between a land of lies.