Sounds to make the birds stop singing

Dear Neurodivergent,

I almost just Googled, "sounds to make the birds stop singing." It worked for pigeons in my old apartment on the Upper West Side so I figured I had a shot with the Cardinals of Carroll Gardens. It's 6AM on the 6th of April (my Mother's Birthday) and the bird song is keeping me awake.

I was writing her a haiku in my head. Pressing the tips of my fingers into Ty's shoulder to count syllables.

It's Mother's Birthday,

I hold her and see nothing

But endless rebirth.

I don't think anyone will get it. The puff piece is something like:

It's Mother's Birthday,

She's more suited for the Spring,

Than yellow tulips.

The point is I ALMOST GOOGLED HOW TO MAKE BIRDS STOP SINGING.

"Your great mistake is to act the drama,

As if you were alone. As if life,

Were a progressive and cunning crime,

With no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions."

It's David Whyte, a biologist turned poet in the Galapagos.

The birds chirping is neither a cunning crime nor a hidden transgression. We don't really give a f*ck about each other until we do, and even then the 'caring' (most of the time) is very one sided.

Suppose you believe, as I do, that the opposite of love is not hate but apathy.

I hate the birds for singing me awake but unless I do unearth some sadistic sound from the internet to perturb them, they will remain apathetic to me.

Like many neurodivergence's mine is categorized and diagnosed by how deeply and with what frequency I feel (my faction feels deeply and frequently 👍🏻). These feelings can invoke everything from writing haiku's for my mother on her birthday to Googling how to make birds stop singing. The degree to which I can and cannot sense like others, has done harm as well as good and although I seek tools to bolster the latter, the former, at least, is not apathy.

A quote I screamed at my mother, drunk at 19 before our reconciliation:

"In order to betray at first you must belong."

I, like many others, have, exhausted, ideated s*icide. When you think of it though, I've heard women describe, while in a pangs of post partum depression, having ideations of violence toward their newborn. I, like all of the women who I've heard describe this experience, don't want. AT. ALL. To realize any of it.

The polarity exists, I think, in a fear of unbelonging. In moments when we believe— or are made to believe— in the betrayal of our existence.

Perhaps the 'disorder' then has nothing to do with seemingly random emotional misfires but with an unwillingness, to be, at all times and at the very least, in relationship to love.