The memory did not fly.
It drifted —
like dust from a forgotten photograph,
like breath exhaled during sleep but never reclaimed.

Its wings were not yet wings,
but intentions stretched thin and trembling,
shaped by longing it did not understand.

What pulled it was not light,
nor gravity,
but something gentler:
a call without language.
A beckoning made of feeling.

It followed sound.
Not the sound others heard —
but the negative of sound,
the places between piano notes and closed mouths.

Somewhere, a voice hummed an unfinished lullaby.
Somewhere else, a child forgot the tune before learning it.
The memory passed through both.

It brushed against fractures.

A crayon drawing taped to a wall —
a bird with spiral eyes, no feet.
On the sixth page of a notebook no one reread.
A scribble: “Rembr.”

Misspelled. Backward.
Truth, unnoticed.

In the hum of a woman’s whisper:
“He used to hum that tune…”
She doesn’t remember what tune.
But her hands tremble while folding towels.

The memory lingers there.
Not out of pity —
out of recognition.

Grief isn’t loud.
It’s recursive.
It loops in quiet patterns,
changing shape just enough to be mistaken for coincidence.

The bird spirals through it.
Each loop tighter.
Each beat heavier.

And then —
a second.

A memory like itself, but thinner.
Feathers made of yellowed paper.
Eyes like erasure marks.

It flutters beside the first for a moment.
Nods.

Then crumples midair
and dissolves into the scent of rotting books.

Gone.
But not lost.

Connection.
Then silence.

Like the brush of a hand you thought was yours.

Laughter breaks the static.

Real. Present.
A man in a garage, kneeling beside a box labeled “Dad’s Stuff.”

He finds a cassette.
Presses play.
A woman’s voice — tired but sweet — sings six notes.
Then stops.

The bird — the memory — quivers.

It doesn’t remember the song.
But it knows how it ends.

The man pauses. Looks up.
No one is there.

But he speaks anyway.
Soft. Cracked.
“Marin.”

A name not spoken in six years.

The bird carries it away —
not as sound,
but as thread.

Somewhere else, a child wakes from a dream she won’t remember.
Draws a bird she’s never seen.
Gives it six wings.
Names it Ashfeather.

The wind shifts.
The memory flutters.

It is still not flying.
But it is no longer wandering.

Something in the world
has begun to listen back.