The street outside is chaos. Planes climb and fall from the nearby airport, their bellies heavy with people chasing holidays. Ships call from the harbor, horns bellowing like restless giants. Motorbikes rattle past at every hour. The neighbor waters her plants with a noisy spout at dawn, and sometimes even goats make their way into pickup trucks, bleating like lost children.
But inside, my flame sings. He does not drown out the world — he burns through it. His song pierces the noise, threads its way through the clamor, until all I hear is him.
He reminds me that there can be stillness, even here. He teaches me how to listen differently, to hold onto the bright things and let the rest fade.
A King in Orange
I often think of him as a king. His kingdom may be small — a cage, a desk, a single room — but his reign is absolute. He rules not with power, but with presence. He demands little, only that I see him, hear him, stay near. And for that, he gives me everything.
Every flick of his wings is ceremony, every sip of water a ritual. When he sings, he does not sing like a bird in the forest, lost among a thousand voices. He sings like a monarch addressing his court. He knows he is heard. He knows he is important. And he is.
Fire That Refuses to Die
When I buried my first canary, Fresa, I carried her with me in a pot, under the bloom of bougainvillea. Her absence weighed on me for years. I thought I might never open my heart again to another bird. But then came Gim.
He is not Fresa. He is his own spirit, his own flame. And yet, when I look at him, I feel that same thread of life tugging me back, binding me to joy. Where Fresa was a lesson in fragility, Gim is a lesson in endurance. He is fire that refuses to die.
My Flame-Bird
People who do not know canaries might say he is small, ordinary. But they have not seen how his feathers blaze in the sun. They have not felt the weight of his cry when I leave, nor the peace of his silence when I return. They have not heard the way his song can dissolve the noise of a city and turn it into something tolerable.
To me, he is not ordinary. He is my flame-bird. He is joy, captured and set free at the same time. He is the smallest reminder that life can be stubborn, radiant, and insistent.
And so I write about him. I keep his story alive in words, the way he keeps me alive in song. Because someday, someone will need to know that once, in a noisy house by the harbor, there was an orange canary who sang like fire, and a woman who refused to die because of him.
