The Two Swifts
There were two swifts who met in the air over a field one evening in late spring. Swifts live almost their whole lives aloft — they eat on the wing, they sleep on the wing, they rarely touch the ground at all. So when these two found each other, banking through the same warm column of air, they did not have the luxury of slowness. They had the evening.
They flew together for one night and most of a day. They matched each other’s turns. They climbed the same thermals and fell through the same dusk. Neither of them had words for it, because swifts don’t, but each knew the other was there the way you know the warmth of a thing without looking at it.
Then the wind changed, the way wind does, and carried them apart. Not by anyone’s choice. Just the air, doing what air does.
The one swift flew on. He carried, somewhere in the small machinery of him, the memory of how the other had banked — and for the rest of his flying life, when he hit a certain kind of evening light, he turned a little, the way you turn toward someone who isn’t there anymore.
He did not mourn it the way we would. But he had been changed by a single day, and he flew differently afterward, and that was its own kind of keeping.
A thing can be brief and still be true.
The wind takes what the wind takes.
Fly on — and turn, sometimes, toward the light.