Sparrow’s Work Song

Matthew Jakubowski

I’ve been wondering how my life would feel if I didn’t have to be a specific person anymore. It’s kind of exhausting maintaining everything I have going on, which isn’t that much, but even without ambitions, you still have to go and be whoever it is you’ve been for however long you’ve been alive.

     On the bus to work this week, I figured the truest self I could’ve been is probably lost decades in the past or disguised in a future far beyond the end of this lifetime. Good luck, best version of me, I hope you’re doing fine somewhere else, moving onward or backward or some other direction without direction.

     In the past ten years, I’ve watched so many people try to climb the ranks in this 63-story building. Their new job titles didn’t protect them, and the nameplates outside their offices changed soon enough. My boss actually offered me a promotion last month. She looked insulted when I said no. But it’s never worth it. There’s nothing up there and nothing much down here either, though at least we can smile when someone on our team starts pretending that what we do in account admin really matters. Up there, overpaid, you have to insist—seven days a week—how much your work matters with furious, unblinking belief. It’s nicer to sit with my colleagues at lunch and air our weekly complaints about the cafeteria’s very popular meatballs. “These meatballs are as tender as dried toothpaste,” someone will say. “Yes, but they’re right here in the building and they only cost five bucks,” someone else will say. They keep us safe from overpriced evils in the outside world, like acai bowls and crab cakes.

     There’s a very specific absence in my life that I hope matters. It has the specific size and shape of my wife, Sarah, from the before times, a shard chipped from the iceberg of a million people dead from COVID, stabbed deep within me. But it’s really starting to feel like her absence doesn’t matter. Besides her friends and family, besides me, who out there wants her to matter? Most people don’t seem to want any of these absences to matter individually—definitely not as a whole. It would be too much to handle, I guess, if they all mattered. But I lost her and have to work in person at the office again, where I first felt the front edge of the thing about to take away my whole life. Me. This blip among millions of other people who felt it too.

     Before Sarah got so sick that I had to take her to the hospital, she said a few feverish things, which I don’t think she knew she was saying. Or maybe they were exactly what she wanted to say to help me survive here without her. One night, we rewatched The Matrix, and she said, Nathan, sensorial reality might be a simulation, but what about inner life and imagination? What if reality kind of hates itself? What about the fine line between very good and very bad poetry? Have you ever noticed the way sparrows look at us—at humans? With awe, but with so much disdain, too.

     Maybe I should change my mind, take the promotion, and go boss around these kind souls who I’ve tolerated for years, to the point of admiration. Maybe that’ll help dissolve these small distracting visions that’ve been nagging me. There’s this new one I’ve had a few times. It starts on the curb outside my office with my favorite sparrow looking up at me. The sparrow opens its beak and I get excited, because maybe some of the poetry Sarah used to write, which she would read to me on the couch, will ring out in her voice, loud and tender and hilarious. But I’m mistaken. Instead, a smaller sparrow emerges, and from that mouth, an even smaller bird, and when the teensy final sparrow hops out of the second to last one’s beak, it cocks its head and says, How the hell did we survive that? Why are we still here? And did we really survive? Are you sure?

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