Inhabit

Ambient music for the bird that stayed. In a city where the silence was killed decades ago, the small singers did not flee the noise; they changed. Their songs grew sharp and jagged, hard enough to cut through the endless traffic, no longer sung for joy but to be heard at all. This is what comes after that fight: the new song, settled. The shouting has quieted into something the bird now owns. It claims the wire, the streetlight, the cold blue hour before the engines wake, and it sings as if this hard place had always been home.

It is not happiness. It is a stranger kind of belonging, the creature that should not have made it finding the shape of its own survival, and finding it beautiful. The wound is still here, carried inside the melody, because the song still holds the form of the noise that tried to erase it. But the bird has stopped bracing against the city. It inhabits it. The music moves like water over stone, the birdsong threading through, the traffic gone soft as memory.