This morning I walk out to the backyard for my daily check on the Eastern blue bird box.

Each year I clean it out and hope and pray that this will be the year that eggs will come.

And chicks will emerge. And fledglings will quietly grow their brilliant cerulean plumage.

And each will poke a head out and take a first look at the new world, and they will be convinced that it is a safe one.

First they’re naked and blind. Then they become beady eyes from underneath mother’s downy breast.

And then they are able to peek through the tiny door.

After several weeks they will take that courageous first flap. Usually a tumble onto the ground, and a flurried frenzy.

But then, coaxed on by mom and dad, they can alight on the clothesline or a nearby shrub.

And from then on, I don’t know, but it makes me anxious.

I see a story that could go either way.

Two options: life or death.

Survival or submission.

Fact is, there were 6 perfect eggs, and only this one goober made it.

I was sure the others were just late bloomers, but no, they were dead.

Dead as dodos – dummies, diseased, unfertilized, unviable, impotent, inept, gross, losers, whatever.

This is the one success story. For now. This one homely dude.

A few more days, and the rent comes due, and it’s time to catch a flight out of here. I’ll probably miss it, it’s quick as a blink.

Proud, shrieking parents, the teenager darting for open space. Orchestrated, pell-mell drama.

Or not.

I might see my dog trot back from the bush with feathery turquoise jowls.

There have been many obstacles: fights with other birds for the nesting box. Bluebirds are shy and don’t stand up for themselves too well, they get bullied.

The specificity of the nesting materials – what the birds can find.

The availability of mealworms. And the weather.

There are cats, and hawks, and squirrels. All of them poach on the nest. Poached eggs.

It’s so easy to be romanced by the smooth, cyan eggs – the sweet potential, the perfection of design. So delicate and exquisite, but packed dense with balled-up chick.

Fact is, the gnarly little dinosaurs have stubbornly survived because of their horned beaks and their obstinate refusal to go extinct.

Evolving over millions of years, they are pre-history, Pre-human history, that is.

They are strappy, scrappy: their beaks scratch, scrape, puncture, poke, peck, peck, peck, again and again, shivs against their incubus prison.

They puff, fluff, fluster, muster, tussle, ruffle, muffle and kerfuffle.

They strain, pop, quake, shake, step, hop, hop hop again, and jump off.

And then?

Lately I’ve been thinking about the term pre-existing conditions.

One of mine is bipolar 2. It’s in my little DNA coil, genetically determined and individually crafted for me.

Beth genes waiting for expression.

At times I think I see patterns in my symptoms, but often they are completely random.

It is this fickle randomness of my own body that makes me think that life has never been a story I could control.

Our bodies, so miraculously designed and constructed, are also scattershot and absurdly random.

But we share one inevitable pre-existing condition: the fact of our mortality.

Death.

We know how our stories end, but still we fly.

We grope for the sunshine through the ragged peephole, and spy the blue, and we go for it.

We fumble, tumble and lurch.

Ideas waiting for expression. Compression, repression, impression.

A high probability scenario: soft wings torn away from tiny sanguine breast, a heartbeat skittering to a stop, a few rufous feathers left as tokens in the grass (the loss of lapis, my hope, my heartache). An ending.

Anyway, afterwards, I’ll clean out the box again, remove the old nest and dispose of the dead eggs, preserved perfection, stillness.

And eggy bits, sticky with fluff and excrement.

And emptiness.

And I imagine wings of purest indigo.

And flight.