The ILoveYou Bird

Rocky, 1999(?)-2011
It occurred to me that I didn't have a nice picture of him up anywhere yet. So here is one, taken in 2006, and I guess I wanna say some stuff about him too. He deserves it. (From me, not from you. I don't expect anyone to read all of my nonsense here)

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Rocky was more like a puppy than a budgie. He met every living thing, especially humans, with the assumption that it would be his friend, and would not be dissuaded until the thing actually tried to hurt him physically, and often not even then. He was never tame in the sense that he really trusted hands, but he was just really friendly. We never saw the need to teach him "step up," but we did have to teach him "get off."

He seemed to love other birds, but they never liked him back. According to his original owner, he was chosen because in the pet store he was found playing by himself in a corner of the cage, happy, but apparently shunned by the other budgies. Over the course of his life, Rocky did have two budgie girlfriends, upon which he did perform his masculine duties for a time, but they never seemed to really bond.

Rocky never really talked. The extent of his mimicry amounted to door squeaks, the chickadee scold, a generic bird sound learned from a video game, my mom's asthma attacks, and eventually he did throw in a "wrrrawwwky!" occasionally during his most excited moments of happy-budgie-rambling. However, his best example of communication was a very specific, subtle head-gesture used to indicate that he wanted the cage door open, and that he would behave himself. Opening the door without this gesture would result in either his not leaving the cage, or his flying around the room like a maniac and landing on your shoulder and biting your face.

Rocky's death was strange for me. We've had many animals over the years, so I've experienced plenty of endings, and usually the sight of a creature that was once full of energy and now isn't is very sad to me. But somehow it didn't seem sad this time. As soon as it stopped moving, it simply wasn't Rocky anymore. Like he didn't die, but went somewhere else. I don't believe in souls that live on after a body dies, or I would say something pertaining to heaven, or "the rainbow bridge," but it really seemed like that little pastel body was just a conduit or vessel used by something completely separate and different, and it had just shut down.

If aliens are real, and they are observing the human race secretly by means we are unlikely to suspect, surely Rocky was one of them.