Exhale: Pretty Little Bird

(2022)

Comic by Sisi-Cynthia Ingenere

Draws reference from  Sza's "Pretty Little Bird", a reimagining of a confrontation with self discovery in a dream state or rather spiritual plane.

 

Exhale: Pretty Little Bird

Shorty Story by Sisi-Cynthia Ingenere

There she was, perching on a branch of splintered stars. Her feathered body colliding with the sky as she curled in my mind. I hear nothing but whispers, a canvas of echoes. 

"You are poetry, can't you see. Lie down and connect to me, feel me beneath your wings".

Though I don't know the song, it's mine. Her wings trembling, dusted with something holy, I recognise the shaky melody- of doubt, the vibrato in search of something that just slips its grasp.

 

"You are but a phoenix among feather.

You’re  broken by the waves among the seas.

They'll let you die, they'll  let you wash away,

but you swim as well as you fly."

- SZA "Pretty Little Bird"

 

"Suki open your eyes. Take a deep breath in". 

Her voice like home but unknown, her eyes pierce into mine as if I was prey and she my predator. Though a remnant of me, I'm terrified. The words suddenly cradled me and my feet slowly begin to move.

"What do you want?" I ask myself as I take a step forward. From a distance I hear, "I don't know." A lie I know all too well, suddenly the daggers that once glanced at my soul lock onto me. Convicted, I fall into truth. 

To feel whole.

"The ground is nothing more than just where you used to be"

Her feathers ruffle, the light bending through their prism-like edge. “whole is a cage” she says softly, lifting her wings to reveal a mirror beneath. It appeared to sway and churn violently but at the same time was so still. Like a vast ocean calling me into its depths. The echoes, symphonies, I began to remember tears of my dreams that threaded away, laughter I'd forgotten. All pieces of me, fractured. Buried and abandoned.

"The sky is just an illusion, the bed that holds your wings."

I close my eyes to escape, but it's useless. “You cannot unsee yourself now'” she says.

'What you've been searching for has never been outside of you but rather in what you've buried and abandoned. The parts of you that you deemed unremarkable, unworthy. It's been here all along.

Pretty little bird, pretty little bird.

“You were never broken, you just forgot how to fly.”