Dressed with birds

She contemplated life and thought it was sad and beautiful

She was delighted with the bird dress. It’s true that it looked more like a girl’s dress. And maybe that’s exactly why she was so attracted to that clothing. It was a red dress painted with blue and green birds, so, two by two on a branch. And there were hundreds of birds. As it is no longer used to go shopping for everything we see, she held on to the impulse, after all, she didn’t need any more dresses and that one was too big for her size. But she liked it so much that she even dreamed of already dressed with birds.

Then she decided, and after being decided, she was affected by intense greediness, an unreasonable urgency, it was necessary to acquire it just before someone bought it. She went to the store under a scorching sun as if she was going to save the planet from a terrible catastrophe. Finally, it was in her arms and she hugged it as tightly as a lost and finally found treasure. Now the seamstress stuck pins here and there to tighten the dress, and also praised the simple and original print.

It was exactly at that moment she suffered a withering attack of tenderness. Turning to the mirror, looking lost in the birds, she smiled pleasantly and without thinking, without understanding, but with her heart overflowing with love, she spoke more to herself than to the other: “If my mother were alive, she would really like this bird dress. She immediately found the speech strange as she had not rehearsed or thought of that sentence.

It was as someone speaking and not her because, at the moment, she herself was transported to another world or another life, whatever. It was something that came out of her soul. That speech went through a time, many ages, lives, worlds, and came out as someone who is resurrected, or as someone who is in complete peace. That voice was hers and it wasn’t. Maybe it looked like someone talking while sleep.

In those little moments, she remembered a lifetime, she remembered the mother sewing and singing on the old machine under the window in the middle room. She remembered her sewing kit, the rulers, scissors, patterns, needles, lines, and scraps scattered on the floor. She remembered the laughter of cheerful sewing apprentices. From there she went straight to the dining room of her childhood home, with the old table and the colored chairs, each in a different color.

She saw the dogs outside, the stone floor, she saw the wooden stairs, the bedrooms. She saw through the window, the flood that came down violently during the heavy rain. She found herself accompanying her mother to the church sacristy to exchange flowers on the altar.

All of this in a few minutes, while the seamstress pinned her to thousands of pins in her dress full of birds. She marvelled at how life could fit in just a few minutes. The dress was too big for her.

Her eyes threatened to spill tears. She sniffed embarrassed. She looked at the dress and thought it was lovingly. She contemplated life and thought it was sad and beautiful. The seamstress just inserted the last pin.