It’s a melancholy spring, slower than usual, and your balcony is plagued by pigeons. You don’t mind them yourself, though they somewhat disturb the rare moments when the weather is nice enough for you to enjoy your (admittedly narrow and now shit-covered) balcony. Today is one such morning, so you are having your coffee outside and reading a book, by which you mean you are holding a book open on your lap while looking at your phone. The wind sometimes turns the pages but you do not. You’re busy looking at a video of Nicole from The Pussycat dolls singing “Buttons” in a skintight red latex jumpsuit. She has not aged a day!!!!!! The comments say. Unproblematic queens stay hot. Your old twin-sized boxspring takes up most of the room on the balcony. You put it there two years ago, after tearing all the fabric and padding from it, thinking you would turn it into a daybed. Thinking you might be someone who would have a daybed. 

Although you never use this potential daybed, the pigeons on your balcony do. They’re a couple, you assume, though maybe that is limited thinking on your part. They moved into the boxspring a few weeks ago and built an endearingly rudimentary nest of at most six sticks. While you, yourself, mostly enjoy the sounds of their coos, your roommate – who is woken up by them every day – does not, so you’re supposed to chase them off the balcony when you see them. Your apartment building, which is a co-op, has been posting increasingly aggressive notices about how pigeons cannot be allowed to nest on the balconies. The last one verged on hysterical – posted in the elevator and mail room in all caps and highlighted – PIGEON EXCREMENT IS A SIGNIFICANT HEALTH RISK AND IS CAUSTIC ENOUGH TO CAUSE PERMANENT DAMAGE TO THE BALCONY’S PROTECTIVE MEMBRANE!!!!!!! You, yourself, are adamantly and vocally in favour of pigeons, one of the things you’ve annoyingly, if accidentally, acquired as a personality trait, often ranting about their intelligence and unfair neglect. 

This morning, because the pigeons are being relatively quiet, because your roommate seems to still be sleeping, because their laughable nest moves you, you let them stay. You enjoy sharing this space with them, the comforting rumble of their noises, the puffed and posturing chest of the male. You go inside to make yourself a second coffee and by the time you return there are two little white eggs sitting under the frame of the daybed, the pigeons sitting beside them rather than on them. You sit with your coffee and stare at the eggs, incredibly, unprecedentedly, not looking at your phone. You can’t imagine how quickly they came to be, only a moment ago you were mocking the nest that had now been initiated into a home. 

But you know what the implications of this are, you know what you will have to do. Your roommate wakes not long after and you tell her about the eggs and immediately wish you hadn’t. EW!! she says. You go on the balcony together and you lift the daybed and she uses the end of a broom to sweep the eggs, along with the collection of twigs, the nest, off the balcony. In the parking lot below there are now two dots of yellow, the colour misleadingly, heartbreakingly, cheerful. Your roommate says something to comfort you, as you are crying alarmingly hard now, and you recoil from her comforting touch and call her a pigeon-hating bitch in your head. You’re sure if she wasn’t there – there in the bigger and nicer room, there being bothered by the pigeon sounds which are really just the sounds of the morning, aren’t they, the sounds of life, their wings beating down against the air – you would have left the eggs. You spend the rest of the day and following night in your hot room ignoring your bitch roommate, falling asleep fully clothed and waking in an uncomfortable layer of sweat. You stay in your room until you hear her leave for work. You put the chain lock on the door to punish her. On the balcony, the pigeons look sad, and you want them to know that you are also sad. You spend another day mourning a loss that is not, really, yours. But you have made it yours. Another thing you have taken from the pigeons. 

By the time your roommate returns at the end of her work day your anger has not yet cooled. You don’t remove the chain lock that prevents her entry and pretend not to be home. She bangs on the door for a while and then leaves, probably going to her boyfriend’s house, probably going to complain about you. The next day she returns, and again you ignore her banging. On the third day, you slip an eviction notice under the door to her. What the fuck! She says and continues banging until she eventually tires and leaves. 

The following day, finally free of your bitch roommate, you sit on the balcony with the pigeons, of which there are now four. By the end of the day each couple has laid two eggs. The following day there are six more pigeons, and the day after that eight. Altogether, by the end of the week, forty-eight pigeons have gathered on your balcony, shoulder to shoulder under the daybed, along the railing, cramped on top of and below the small bistro table you sit at to drink your coffee, all in pairs of two, and each pair with a little set of pearly white eggs set atop a rudimentary nest, some nests more intricate than others. Your neighbours, bothered by the sound and shit, are outraged. Notes are slipped under your door, from them, from the building manager, from your bitch roommate, all containing threats that cause you varying degrees of concern, but never enough to act. Your building manager threatens eviction, but as you live in a co-op building, you know your resident’s rights are rock solid and that this will take months of litigation to actually follow through on. Eventually the notes stop, as does the banging on your door. 

You and the pigeons are all, now, getting used to one another. The melancholy spring has passed into a soft summer and it’s been weeks, maybe longer, since you left your apartment. There’s no longer any reason to. When you need to eat you order food and tell the delivery drivers to leave it at the front door of your building, and then direct five to ten pigeons down and watch them, after struggling to arrange the bags of food in their sharp claws, lift the food onto your balcony. It was surprisingly easy to train them to do so – a return to their ancestral cause, the carrier pigeon roots translating surprisingly well to food delivery. There are times where you realize several days have gone by since you last spoke out loud and you are surprised to realize this doesn’t disturb you, but you rather find it kind of sweet. The discovered needlessness of language. Sometimes you wake to the sound of coos and you’re not sure if they are yours or the pigeons that now fill your balcony and apartment. As the shit piles up – on your couch, your floor, your books, your balcony – it becomes beautiful, pearlescent especially in the sun, like shells or even jewels, and you come to enjoy its acrid smell, its chalky texture. Your phone is buried under shit somewhere. You lost track of it long ago and you do not miss it. You do not miss Nicole in her skintight jumpsuit with her well kept body. At some point you realize you haven’t heard the usually omnipresent noises of your neighbours, neither those on either side of you nor those above or below. You peek around your balcony partition and, through the small window, see that the apartment next door has been emptied. You look into the apartment on the other side and find the same. You look into the parking lot below, usually filled with cars, and see that not a single one is left. Just you and the birds, now. And what else should there be? 

*** 

Eventually, they will come with cranes and wrecking balls and dynamite and yelling, spitting, smoking men in hard hats. You know this. Eventually this building will be razed to the ground, or will crumble from the caustic nature of the pigeon shit, will forget all the very many lives that once were led within it. Eventually these pigeons will get angry and get revenge, or they will die, or forget how to find empty sky amid all the condos, or find a new and more noble thing to deliver. Eventually this empty parking lot will become a parking garage and fill anew with cars as it was meant to, or it will be a data centre, or a row of Tesla charging stations. Eventually your bitch roommate will think back on you with pity instead of anger. She will warn her children to pick the people they live with carefully, and they will have the money to do so. Eventually, the bird shit will cover you and you will be rendered imobile, inanimate, a modern mummification, your endless yet limited information, your useless noise, your fears and desires, all of this will become still under the weight and it will be a relief. Your body will disappear under the layers of pearly shit and you will know, as you surrender to it, that it was all enough, all worthy, to be flanked by the birds. To have learnt their language and forgotten your own. To have refused to break their eggs, the two little dots of heartbreaking yellow on the concrete below.

___________________